Will lab diamond prices go down in 2026?
Yes, and hardly. Both halves of that are true, and which one you get depends on whether you are buying a loose stone or a finished ring. Wholesale grown stones have carried on drifting down through 2025 and into this year. A ring made from one has barely moved.The stone side is not in dispute. De Beers said the number out loud when it closed its own Lightbox brand in 2025: wholesale lab-grown prices had fallen roughly 90 per cent since 2018. What matters for a buyer in 2026 is not that fall but its shape.
Wholesale price of a benchmark grown stoneIndex with 2018 set to 100. Rounded readings of a direction, not a published series.Shape and rough magnitude follow Paul Zimnisky's lab-grown diamond price index and De Beers' own statement, on closing Lightbox in 2025, that wholesale lab-grown prices had fallen around 90 per cent since 2018. Bain's Global Diamond Report tracks the same widening gap against natural stones, and Edahn Golan and Tenoris, who follow United States retail, report far smaller falls at the counter than at wholesale. Published series disagree substantially on any single year, and every figure here is rounded, so read the shape rather than the level. There is no Australian index of lab-grown prices, wholesale or retail, and anyone quoting you a local one has built it themselves. The floor line is maker+stone's estimate and is published by nobody.
The collapse happened between 2022 and 2024. Since then the line has bent towards flat, because a price falling towards the cost of making the thing runs out of room. That is the useful fact for anyone deciding whether to buy now: the enormous falls are behind us, and what is left is a slow drift.201820192020202120222023202420252026
Roughly where cost of production plus a thin margin sits, on our reading. Prices cannot spend long underneath it.
2018
100
Where the index starts. A one carat grown stone was still a few thousand dollars wholesale, and retail sat close behind natural.2022
45
Indian and Chinese capacity arrives in volume. This is where the gentle decline turns into a collapse.2024
17
The bottom of the fall. Growers close, and De Beers shuts its own Lightbox brand the following year.2026
11
Still going down, at a small fraction of the annual rate of three years ago.maker+stone's reading, not a forecastWe expect the wholesale stone to keep giving up a little each year for a few more years, and the retail price of a finished ring to move by a few per cent at most. Anyone promising you that grown diamonds will be nearly free is selling a story, and so is anyone telling you prices have found their bottom and are about to firm up.
The stone is not the ring
When a headline says lab diamond prices are collapsing, it is talking about a polished stone bought by the parcel in Surat or Mumbai. That is not the thing you buy. You buy a ring: a stone, some gold, several hours of a jeweller's attention, GST, and a business that will still be answering the phone when a claw lifts in year six.Here is our own split of a $6,000 lab-grown solitaire, with the direction each part has been travelling printed next to it.
What $6,000 actually pays forA well-cut lab-grown solitaire in 18ct gold, as we cost oneOur own breakdown of a ring we make and sell at $6,000, rounded to whole percentage points. It is not an industry average, and no published Australian breakdown of a finished ring exists: a shop with a city window carries a much bigger last slice, and an online-only seller a smaller one. GST is ten per cent of the pre-tax price, which works out at one eleventh of the ticket. Direction of travel on the metal follows the LBMA gold price in Australian dollar terms, and on labour the Australian Bureau of Statistics wage price index.
Count the gold slices. There is one. The stone is the only part of that ring getting cheaper, and it is under a fifth of the price. Halve the stone tomorrow and the ring is nine per cent cheaper, assuming nothing else moves, and something else always moves.There is a second effect underneath the first, and it is the one worth carrying away. Every fall in the stone shrinks the stone's share of the ring, so the next fall has less to work on. In 2018 the stone was most of what you paid for a grown-diamond ring and the deflation went straight through to the ticket. Today it is a slice, and by the time it is a tenth the wholesale index can do what it likes without you noticing.Price on the ticket$6,000
18%
The stone$1,080
A well-cut, eye-clean grown stone of about one and a half to two carats, bought at wholesale.Getting cheaperDown every year since 2018, and still drifting down.
11%
Gold, casting and findings$660
Four to six grams of 18ct gold, plus the head that holds the stone, the shank and the wax it was cast from.Getting dearerGold in Australian dollars has roughly doubled in five years.
13%
Bench labour and finishing$780
Seating the stone, filing, polishing, plating where the metal calls for it, and the check that catches a claw sitting proud.Getting dearerFollows Australian wages. It has never had a down year.
9%
GST$540
One eleventh of the ticket, charged on the finished ring rather than on the stone inside it.Not movingSet in legislation at ten per cent of the pre-tax price.
49%
Running the business$2,940
Photography, freight, insurance, returns, warranty work, the person who answers when a stone comes loose in year six, and the margin that keeps all of it available.Getting dearerRent, wages and software have all gone up.
Why the stone keeps falling
There is no mystery in it, and no conspiracy either. A grown diamond comes out of one of two machines: a press that squeezes carbon around a seed at the pressure found under a continent, or a chamber that rains carbon onto a seed plate out of a plasma. Both are factory equipment, and factory equipment gets better at what it does.Three things happened at once. Capacity was built out faster than anyone was buying, mostly in China and India, where a press is cheaper to install and the power to run it is cheaper still. Output per run kept improving, so the same reactor and the same electricity now yield more carats of better colour than they did five years ago. And because the cost of a stone is mostly the machine and the power, spreading both across more carats drops the cost of every one of them.What that adds up to is a manufactured commodity, and manufactured commodities all end in the same place: a price close to the cost of production plus a margin thin enough to make you wonder why anyone bothers. Flat-panel televisions did it. Solar panels did it. Nothing about carbon in a diamond lattice exempts it from the pattern, and Bain's Global Diamond Report has been describing this happening in real time for several years now.
A parcel of grown stones is priced the way a parcel of anything manufactured is priced. The interesting question is not whether it gets cheaper but what happens when it reaches the cost of making it.And that is why the curve flattens rather than continuing down at the 2023 angle. When a price goes under the cost of production, capacity leaves: growers shut, machines go back to industrial abrasives and to the semiconductor work some of the chambers can do, and the biggest player in the industry closes its own grown-diamond brand, which is precisely what De Beers did with Lightbox in 2025. Supply leaving is what puts a floor under a price, and it is happening now.One honest caveat about all these figures. Every index in this business is built on wholesale trades in other countries, and Australia has no published price index for lab-grown stones at all, let alone for finished rings. What we can tell you about the local market is what we pay and what we see quoted, which is a smaller and more anecdotal thing than a number in a chart makes it look.
Is it worth waiting a year?
This is the question the whole subject is really about, and it deserves arithmetic rather than an opinion. Take the $6,000 ring from further up the page, apply twelve months to each line of it, and see what comes out the other end.
Waiting twelve months, line by lineThe same $6,000 ring, bought in August 2027 instead of August 2026
About the price of a nice dinner, on a $6,000 ring, in exchange for a year. And the sign on that total is not even safe: two of those lines are gold and wages, both of which have lately moved faster than the stone has fallen, so a perfectly ordinary year hands you a ring that costs slightly more.Waiting does pay in two specific cases. The first is a much bigger stone: at four or five carats the stone is a far larger share of the ring, so the deflation has something to bite on. The second is not about timing at all. If you were about to be quoted a 2019 price for a 2026 stone, then the money you save is not in waiting, it is in comparing, and you can have it this afternoon. Our guide to what a one carat should cost has the Australian bands to check a quote against.The ring today$6,000
The stoneGrown stones at wholesale have lately been falling in the order of ten to fifteen per cent a year rather than the halvings of 2022 to 2024. Taken off the $1,080 of stone in this ring.
−$130Gold, casting and findingsGold has risen in four of the past five years. A flat year is the good case, not the base case.
+$40Bench labour and finishingA jeweller's wages go one way, and so does the hour it takes to set a stone.
+$15Running the businessRent, insurance, freight and software rise with everything else in the economy.
+$60GSTOne eleventh of whatever the ticket ends up being, so it simply follows the rest.
−$2The same ring in twelve months$5,983
The gold sliver at the right is the entire reward for waiting: $17 off $6,000, drawn at the narrowest width that shows up at all.
maker+stone's arithmetic on maker+stone's own cost breakdown, and not a forecast anyone publishes. The stone line uses the recent annual rate of decline in Paul Zimnisky's lab-grown diamond price index rather than the much steeper falls of 2022 to 2024. The gold, labour and business lines assume a mild rise, which is what the LBMA gold price and the Australian Bureau of Statistics wage price index have done lately. Change any single assumption and the total moves by tens of dollars, which is the point: nothing plausible moves it by thousands.The one version of waiting we do recommendWait because the money is not saved yet. A ring bought on a card or a personal loan costs more than any price movement will ever save you, and the interest is certain in a way that the wholesale index is not.
Gold went the other way
While the stone was collapsing, the metal around it was doing the opposite. Gold in Australian dollars has roughly doubled in five years and is up something like threefold over a decade, which has quietly changed the make-up of every ring we sell.
Gold in Australian dollars, with 2016 set to 100Rounded from the LBMA gold price expressed in Australian dollars, to the nearest fifty index points, because spot moves daily and the exchange rate moves underneath it. Gold is the one input in an engagement ring with a public price you can look up yourself, which makes it the easiest figure in this article to check and the only one we would defend to a decimal place.
The practical consequences turn up in the parts of a ring nobody photographs. A heavier band costs meaningfully more than it did in 2019. So does a wide setting, a chunky bezel, or a second band to sit alongside. Five years ago we would talk a customer up to a heavier shank without much thought about the cost, and now it is a real line in the quote.It also means the two halves of your ring are moving in opposite directions, which is a strange thing to hold in your head and a useful one. The part that gets cheaper is the part everybody looks at. The part that gets dearer is the part that has to survive thirty years of being knocked against door handles.2016
100
2021
150
2026
300
Do not read that as an investment caseGold rising does not make a gold ring a good way to own gold. You pay retail for the making and sell at scrap, which is why a band recovers something like 45 per cent of its price and a bullion coin recovers nearly all of it. Buy the ring for the ring.
The ceiling on resale
A falling new price does something specific and unforgiving to the second-hand price: it sets a ceiling on it. Nobody pays more for a used ring than a new one costs, so every time the new price steps down, the whole market underneath it steps down too.
Selling a $6,000 lab-grown ring, three years onEvery bar is drawn against the price paid in 2026
So lab-grown resale is poor, and our honest expectation is that it stays poor for as long as new stones keep getting cheaper. There is no sentiment in that. It is the same arithmetic that makes a two-year-old laptop hard to sell.What we will not do is let the natural stone off the hook, because the comparison is where this argument is usually smuggled through. A natural diamond ring sold to a dealer comes back at something like a fifth to two fifths of what it cost, which is a better number and nowhere near a good one. Do not buy a diamond of any origin as a store of value. Our worth-it guide puts both origins on the same axis, and the honest conclusion there is that if you want an asset you want bullion.The one place the falling price genuinely costs you money is insurance, because you can spend years paying a premium on a replacement cost that no longer exists. Revalue every few years, or insure off the purchase invoice. How Australian insurers handle it is worth five minutes before you set the sum insured.What you paid in 2026$6,000
The ticket on the day, GST included.The same ring, bought new, in 2029$4,800
Our reading. The stone in it is cheaper by then and nothing else is, so the ring gives up some of its price and not much.Sold privately, with the report$1,200 to $1,800
Priced off that cheaper new ring, then discounted again for being second-hand, unreturnable and slow to shift.Offered across a trade counter$300 to $900
Most jewellers will not quote at all, because a new stone at your grades costs them less than a fair price for yours.The dashed line is what the same ring costs new in 2029. Everything below it is priced from it, so when it drops, they drop.
The recovery ranges match the resale figures in our guide to whether a lab-grown diamond is worth buying, which are drawn from published resale-channel data in the United States, where the second-hand trade is large enough to report on. Australia has no published figures and a thinner pool of buyers, so the local outcome usually sits at the low end of each range. The 2029 new price is maker+stone's reading of how slowly a finished ring gives up its price, not a forecast published by anyone.Where to put the money instead
If the deflating part of a ring is the stone, then the money is better spent on the parts that do not deflate. That is not a sales line for the expensive options. It is the practical conclusion of everything above, and it points away from the thing most buyers spend on.Cut quality first, always. It is the one grade that decides whether the ring looks alive across a table, it costs a fraction of what colour and clarity cost, and it is the grade a grown stone can be lazy about without anyone noticing on paper. Since October 2025 a GIA report on a grown stone will not even print colour and clarity, which makes the argument for buying on cut and on an IGI report you can read stronger than it was.Then the setting and the metal. A band heavy enough to stay round, claws seated into the girdle rather than bent over it, a head built for the stone that is actually going in it. None of that gets cheaper next year, all of it decides whether the ring is still wearable in 2050, and it is where the difference between two rings at the same price is visible from a metre away.
The hours at this bench are the part of your ring with no deflation in it, and the part that decides whether the stone is still there in thirty years.And the last piece of advice is the one that makes the rest of the page redundant. Stop pricing the ring against next year's ring and start pricing it against the number of days it gets worn. On that arithmetic a $6,000 ring worn daily for forty years costs about forty cents a day, and a wholesale index moving a few per cent either way is not a number worth a year of your life. Our cost per year of wear works it through.
What we would do with $6,000 todayBuy the stone at F to G colour and VS clarity with an excellent or ideal cut, take the carat weight the budget allows after that, and put every dollar the grades saved into the metal and the bench. You will own a better object than the person who spent the same money on a D Flawless, and in five years you will both have watched the stone in it get cheaper.
Trying to time it?Send us the specification you are looking at and we will tell you what it costs here today, what we think it costs in a year, and whether waiting is worth it in your case. Sometimes the answer is yes, and we will say so.
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