Lone Star Coins Review

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Lone Star Coins operates out of a single showroom on Northwest Loop 410 in San Antonio, Texas, and has bought and sold gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rare coins, and jewelry there since the early 1980s.

The business changed hands in 2025 when the founding family completed a full transition to second-generation ownership, meaning the people running the counter today are the same people who own the company.

This review looks at what Lone Star Coins sells, how its buying and selling process works, what its credentials actually mean, and how its pricing stacks up against current market data.

Key Takeaways

• Lone Star Coins is a family-owned San Antonio dealer with over 40 years in business and no outside investors.
• The company holds authorized dealer status with PCGS and NGC, plus membership in the ANA and the National Coin & Bullion Association.
• Spot gold sat near $4,055 per ounce and spot silver near $58 per ounce in late July 2026, a useful benchmark for judging any dealer's premiums.

Gold prices near $4,000 an ounce would have sounded absurd five years ago. Today they're routine. That backdrop matters when evaluating any bullion dealer, because premiums over spot are where the real cost of buying or selling gets decided, not the sticker price of the metal itself.

Company Background

Lone Star Coins traces its roots to the early 1980s, making it one of the older independent coin shops still operating in South Texas.

The showroom sits at 2622 Northwest Loop 410 in San Antonio, open Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm and Saturdays from 9am to 4pm, closed Sundays.

The business describes itself as the largest bullion and coin dealer in the San Antonio metro area by in-stock inventory, a claim tied to the physical volume of coins, bars, and collectibles kept on site rather than to sales figures the company has made public.

What sets it apart from a lot of regional dealers is the ownership structure. In 2025 the company finished converting to full family ownership, removing any outside investors or corporate parent.

For a customer walking in to sell an inherited coin collection, that detail is more than trivia. It means the person weighing your gold on the scale has a direct stake in the business's long-term reputation, not a quarterly sales target from a private equity owner three states away.

What They Sell

The inventory splits into a few clear categories. Bullion makes up the bulk of it: American Gold Eagles, Canadian Gold and Silver Maple Leafs, Krugerrands, PAMP Suisse and Valcambi Suisse bars, and generic silver rounds and bars in sizes from one ounce up to ten ounces.

Then there's the numismatic side, which includes Morgan silver dollars, graded coins certified by PCGS and NGC, and foreign gold issues like Mexican pesos and Chinese Gold Pandas.

A smaller but notable slice of the catalog is genuinely rare material. The site lists items such as an 1838 South Peru 8 Reales graded PCGS MS63 priced at $7,000, and a 1742 Lima Mint Peru 8 Escudos gold cob in NGC AU condition listed at $13,000. These aren't bullion-priced items. They're numismatic pieces where rarity and grade, not metal weight, set the price.

Prices above reflect listed catalog prices as of late July 2026 and move daily with spot metal prices.

Selling to Lone Star Coins

The selling process, based on the company's own description, follows a fairly standard pattern for reputable shops: items get weighed on certified scales in front of the customer, tested for authenticity, and the calculation gets explained before an offer is made.

Payment happens the same day. There's no stated sales commission charged to the seller, and no obligation to accept the offer.

This applies across several categories:

That last category matters more than it might seem. A shop set up to handle estate liquidations and institutional consignments generally has appraisal capacity that a walk-in-only pawn shop doesn't.

Lone Star Coins maintains a dedicated page for institutions and estates, suggesting it fields larger, more complex transactions beyond a single ring or a handful of coins.

Credentials and Reputation

Here's where things get more concrete than most reviews bother to get. Lone Star Coins holds authorized dealer status with both PCGS (Professional Coin Grading Service) and NGC (Numismatic Guaranty Company), the two dominant third-party grading services in US numismatics.

It's also listed as a member of the American Numismatic Association and the National Coin & Bullion Association, two trade groups that require dealers to agree to codes of ethical conduct as a condition of membership.

The Better Business Bureau lists the company with an A+ rating. On Google, the business shows a 4.7 rating.

On eBay, where the company operates a storefront under the same name, feedback sits above 35,000 with a reported 100% positive rating, which for a resale marketplace of that volume is a meaningful track record rather than a handful of cherry-picked reviews.

None of that guarantees a good price on any individual transaction. It does mean the company has submitted itself to outside verification (grading authentication, trade association standards, public review platforms) rather than asking customers to take its word for anything.

Pricing in Context

Spot price is the baseline every bullion transaction gets measured against. As of July 24, 2026, gold traded around $4,052 to $4,068 per ounce depending on the exact hour, up roughly 21% from the same period a year earlier.

Silver traded near $58 per ounce that same week, up more than 50% year over year, pushing the gold-to-silver ratio down to around 69.5, a sign silver has been outperforming gold on a relative basis through mid-2026.

Retail premiums (the markup a dealer charges above spot to cover overhead, insurance, and margin) typically run anywhere from a few percent on generic silver rounds to 8% or more on small gold bars and coins with mint packaging.

Lone Star Coins' listed catalog shows some items priced right at spot with no added premium, such as a promotional silver round listed at 100% off premium, alongside standard bullion carrying more typical markups in the 5% to 15% range.

Buyers comparing dealers should always check the premium over spot at the moment of purchase rather than relying on a headline price, since spot itself shifts by the minute during market hours.

Selling side premiums work in reverse. A dealer's buyback price sits below spot, and the gap between buy and sell prices is effectively the dealer's spread.

Lone Star Coins states it prices buybacks close to national competitors, though it doesn't publish a fixed buyback percentage, which is typical across the industry since buyback rates shift with item condition, quantity, and current demand.

The Showroom Experience

Customer reviews describe a fairly consistent pattern: staff who explain testing and weighing before quoting a number, transactions that wrap up in fifteen to twenty minutes for straightforward jewelry or coin sales, and pricing that gets shown on screen rather than quoted verbally.

One recurring theme in reviews is that staff assessed jewelry pieces for their actual resale or numismatic value rather than defaulting to scrap gold pricing, which matters for anyone selling estate jewelry that might carry more value than its melt weight suggests.

That said, prospective sellers should walk in with realistic expectations. No dealer, regardless of reputation, pays full spot price for scrap gold or common bullion, since the business model depends on a spread between buy and sell prices.

The relevant question isn't whether Lone Star Coins pays 100% of spot. It's whether the spread is competitive with other dealers in the San Antonio area and whether the process feels transparent while it happens.