How much is the Padmanabhaswamy temple treasure worth?

Nobody knows officially. The widely quoted figure of over Rs 1 lakh crore (about $22 billion) is an unofficial 2011 estimate reported by the media, and no court, government or temple body has published a valuation.

Has Vault B of the Padmanabhaswamy temple been opened?

Not under the court-ordered inventory. Five vaults (A, C, D, E and F) were inventoried from 2011, but Vault B was not. As of late 2026 it remained closed, although reports on former CAG Vinod Rai's audit said temple records showed it had been opened several times between 1990 and 2002, which the royal family disputes.

Who owns the Padmanabhaswamy temple treasure?

The deity. In 2011 both the Kerala government and the Travancore royal family told the Supreme Court in affidavits that everything in the vaults belongs to Sree Padmanabhaswamy and that neither of them has any claim to it.

What did the Supreme Court decide in 2020?

On 13 July 2020 the Supreme Court held that the Travancore royal family's right to manage the temple as shebait continued, set up an Administrative Committee chaired by the Thiruvananthapuram District Judge and an Advisory Committee, ordered a 25-year audit, and left the decision on opening Vault B to those committees.

Was gold found missing from the Padmanabhaswamy temple?

Former CAG Vinod Rai's special audit, filed in 2016, reportedly said 769 gold pots weighing about 776 kg, valued at Rs 186 crore, could not be traced and that about 263 kg of gold was lost in purification. The royal family rejected the report as one-sided, and no court has made a finding on it.

Why has the treasure never been valued?

The court-ordered exercise was an inventory, not a valuation. The temple told the Supreme Court in 2011 there was no need to value items that were not going to be sold, and the expert committee was asked to classify articles as heritage, ritual or merely monetary, not to price them.

Padmanabhaswamy temple treasure: what is it worth?

The short answer: Nobody officially knows. The famous figure, “over Rs 1 lakh crore”, is an unofficial estimate from July 2011 that was never confirmed by any court or government [1][12]. The Supreme Court ordered an inventory, not a valuation. Vault B, the one chamber everyone asks about, still hasn’t been inventoried. And between 2020 and 2021, the temple sitting on top of all this ran so short of cash that it said it could barely pay salaries [2].

Key numbers
Vaults (kallaras) named in the case	Six, labelled A to F [1]
Vaults inventoried under court orders from 2011	Five (A, C, D, E, F) [1]
Widely quoted value of the five vaults	Over Rs 1 lakh crore, an unofficial media estimate from 2011 [12][9]
Official valuation published	None [1][3]
Gold pots former CAG Vinod Rai’s audit could not trace	769 pots, about 776 kg, put at Rs 186 crore (2016 report, as reported) [10][11]
Devotees’ cash offerings (kanikka), 4 Jan to 20 Dec 2019	Rs 5,68,96,260 [1]
Kerala government spending on the temple, 2012 to 2019	Rs 11.70 crore, excluding its fixed annual grant [1]
Fixed annual grant from the state under a 1950 law	Rs 6 lakh [1]
IBJA 999 gold, 12 November 2026 closing rate	Rs 1,37,692 per 10 g, before GST [6]

Where the Rs 1 lakh crore number came from

In 2009 a retired IPS officer and devotee, T.P. Sundararajan, went to the Kerala High Court asking that the state take over the temple [12]. On 31 January 2011 the High Court agreed. It ordered the government to take over the temple and its assets, open all the vaults, make an inventory and build a museum to show the treasures [1].

The High Court was blunt about the records it had seen. Registers produced in court were “thoroughly incomplete and unreliable”, it said, and the management had refused to produce an inventory said to have been prepared by the last ruler [1].

The royal family appealed. On 2 May 2011 the Supreme Court stayed the takeover but ordered a detailed inventory of the vaults, to be done in front of observers, including two retired High Court judges [1]. Its order noted that vaults A and B had “reportedly not opened for more than a century” [1].

Stock-taking began on 27 June 2011 [12]. Within days, news reports said the haul ran to gold coins, jewel-studded idols and ornaments worth more than Rs 1 lakh crore, or about $22 billion [12][9]. Sundararajan, who started it all, died on 17 July 2011 [12].

Here’s the catch. That number never came from an official valuation. Even contemporary reports that repeated it called it an estimate, and its source was never made clear [17]. Later reports didn’t agree with one another: one in 2025 described Vault A alone as estimated at Rs 2 lakh crore [15]. Treat every figure you see as a rough guess, not a count.

Why no one has put a price on it

This is the core of the mystery, and the court record answers most of it.

The court asked “what is there”, not “what is it worth”

In affidavits dated 14 July 2011, both the Kerala government and the royal family said the same thing: everything in the vaults belongs to the deity, Sree Padmanabhaswamy, and neither the state nor the family has any claim over it [1].

The temple’s affidavit went further. It said the “primary object of the inventory is to ascertain what is available and not disposal or sale”, so “there is no need to have a valuation” [1]. The state said the articles should stay inside the temple and were not suitable for a separate museum [1].

On 21 July 2011 the Supreme Court set up an expert committee led by Dr C.V. Ananda Bose, then Director General of the National Museum, with members from the Archaeological Survey of India and the Reserve Bank of India’s security wing [1]. Its job was to organise the inventory with photographs and video and sort every item into three groups [1]:

Articles with historic, heritage, artistic or antique value.
Articles needed for regular temple rituals.
Articles with “merely a monetary value”.

Notice what’s missing: a rupee figure. The committee was told to classify, conserve and secure the items. It was never asked to price them.

Antiques don’t have a market price

Even if someone wanted a number, much of the hoard couldn’t be priced the way a gold bar can. The royal family’s own 2011 proposal described some articles as “priceless” for their history and art [1]. Centuries-old ornaments and coins are valued by collectors and museums, not by the gram. Melting them for their metal would destroy most of what makes them valuable.

Gold has moved a lot since 2011

Even the metal part of any 2011 estimate is long out of date. RBI data show gold in Mumbai averaged Rs 25,722 per 10 grams in 2011-12 [5]. The IBJA benchmark for 24-carat gold closed at Rs 1,37,692 per 10 grams on 12 November 2026 [6]. That’s about 5.4 times higher (our calculation). Whatever share of the treasure is plain gold would be worth several times its 2011 figure today.

We aren’t converting the Rs 1 lakh crore into a 2026 number, because no one has ever said how much of it was gold by weight. (For how gold’s price has tracked prices in India, see our explainer on whether gold always beats inflation.)

The inventory itself was never published

The Kerala government spent Rs 6.02 crore on digital archiving of the temple’s antiques and artefacts between 2012 and 2019, plus Rs 1.22 crore on strengthening Vault A and Rs 1.20 crore on the expert committee [1]. By July 2017 the Supreme Court recorded that the expert committee had “substantially completed its task” [1]. The resulting inventory was meant to be filed in court and shared with the parties [1]. It hasn’t been published. As of 2020, reports said no written public inventory of the contents existed [17].

Vault B: the chamber that stays shut

Vault B sits beside Vault A, close to the sanctum [1]. The royal family and many devotees have opposed opening it, saying it would go against custom and belief [15][16]. Some also say it could harm the structure because it sits so close to the deity [15]. Folklore has filled the silence: a cobra carving on the door, curses, an underground link to the sea [9].

The legal position is simpler.

2011: The Supreme Court asked the expert committee to give an opinion on whether it was “necessary to open Kallara ‘B’ at this stage” [1].
2014 and 2017: Court orders recorded that Vault B had not been opened and that its inventory would be made only after an express order from the court [1].
13 July 2020: The final judgment left the decision to “the best judgement and discretion” of the new Administrative and Advisory Committees [1].
7 August 2025: At a joint meeting, the state government’s representative raised Vault B. The committees decided they needed the tantri’s (chief priest’s) opinion before recording any position [14][15].
October 2026: A news report said Vault B was still unopened [17].

Has it really never been opened?

That’s disputed. News reports on Vinod Rai’s audit said temple records showed Vault B had been opened several times between 1990 and 2002 [8][15]. Accounts of the exact count differ, and some put it at seven [15]. The royal family has denied that the vault was opened and maintains it must stay sealed [16]. The audit reports themselves haven’t been made public, so we can’t check the underlying records.

The missing-gold questions

The treasure story has a second thread: was everything accounted for before 2011, and since?

What the court’s advisers said

In April 2014 the court’s amicus curiae, senior advocate Gopal Subramanium, recommended a special audit of the temple for the previous 25 years, covering the royal family’s Sree Padmanabha Swamy Temple Trust too [1][2]. Reports at the time said his report found gold and silver offered by devotees had not been accounted for properly [12]. On 24 April 2014 the court ordered a special audit, preferably by former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai, and replaced the temple’s management with an interim committee headed by the District Judge [1].

What Rai’s audit reportedly found

Rai’s reports were filed with the court and have not been released. What we know comes from news reports quoting copies.

February 2015: Reports said about 893 kg of gold had been taken out for plating and purification, on 82 occasions, but only about 627 kg came back, a gap of roughly 266 kg. Reports said returned gold was assessed by weight, not purity [7][8].
March 2016: Rai’s final report, according to reports, said 769 gold pots, weighing about 776 kg and valued at Rs 186 crore, could not be traced, and that about 263 kg of gold was lost in purification [10][11]. The calculation was based on serial numbers: a pot numbered 1988 had turned up in 2011, so there “should” have been 1,166 pots left after 822 were melted, but only 397 were handed over [10].
September 2016: Rai reportedly flagged “misrepresentation” in the trust’s income tax returns for 2008-09 to 2013-14 [13].

The royal family rejected the findings. It said Rai relied only on the numbers written on the pots, in old Malayalam script, never recorded the family’s version and couldn’t know the numbers were meant to run in sequence [10]. The temple’s executive officer also questioned the assumption that only pots were numbered [10]. No court has ruled on whether anything was actually lost.

For scale: if those 776 kg were pure gold, they would be worth about Rs 1,068 crore at the 12 November 2026 IBJA rate (our calculation, from [6]). The pots’ purity was never published, so the real figure would be lower.

The 2026 police report

In May 2026 a confidential intelligence report from April 2024 became public [18][19]. Reports said it alleged about 78 grams of gold bars and coins offered by devotees were missing and raised security concerns [19]. The temple’s administrative committee said its own physical check found nothing missing, including a diamond ornament named in the report, and said it would take legal action against the report [18][19]. No finding has been made either way.

Rich in vaults, short of cash

Here’s the most surprising part of the story. The treasure can’t pay the bills.

Everything in the vaults belongs to the deity, and the temple’s position has always been that it isn’t for sale [1]. So the temple runs on ordinary income: offerings, rents, rituals and a fixed Rs 6 lakh a year from the state under the Travancore-Cochin Hindu Religious Institutions Act, 1950 [1].

That income is modest. Cash offerings in the kanikka came to Rs 5.69 crore between 4 January and 20 December 2019 [1]. Set against the unofficial Rs 1 lakh crore estimate, that’s roughly 17,600 years of offerings (our calculation).

Then came Covid-19. Devotees were barred from 24 March to 25 August 2020 [2]. In December 2020 the Administrative Committee told the Supreme Court the temple was “facing financial crisis” and its savings had “almost been drained out” [2]. By August 2021 it reported that its fixed deposits and savings would be “completely depleted” after two more months of salaries, gratuity and debts, and said it could only survive “with the aid of the Trust and the Government” [2].

Meanwhile, the court’s 2020 judgment asked the temple to repay the Rs 11.70 crore the state had spent on it from 2012 to 2019, and to bear the cost of police security from then on [1]. The committees asked the state for more time to repay [2].

Who runs the temple now

The Supreme Court’s judgment of 13 July 2020 settled the big legal question. It held that the Travancore royal family’s right to manage the temple as shebait, or hereditary manager, survived the death of the last ruler in 1991 [1]. The family’s trustee cannot draw any pay for the role [1].

Day-to-day running sits with two committees [1][3]:

Administrative Committee (five members): the Thiruvananthapuram District Judge as chair, one nominee each of the trustee, the Kerala government and the Union Culture Ministry, and the temple’s chief tantri. It can’t spend more than Rs 15 lakh a month on any item, or Rs 1 crore at one time, without the trustee’s approval [3].
Advisory Committee (three members): a retired High Court judge, a nominee of the trustee and a chartered accountant [3].

The court also ordered an audit of the previous 25 years by a firm of chartered accountants [1]. In 2021 the trust argued it was a separate entity and shouldn’t be audited. The Supreme Court rejected that on 22 September 2021 and asked for the audit within three months [2]. The deadline was later extended, and in July 2022 the court disposed of the extension applications [4]. We couldn’t find a public copy of that audit’s findings.

So, what is it worth?

The honest answer has three parts.

Known: Five vaults were opened and inventoried from 2011 under Supreme Court supervision, and their contents belong to the deity [1].

Estimated: The Rs 1 lakh crore figure is a 2011 media estimate, never confirmed officially, and it leaves out Vault B and the antique value of the items [9][17]. Gold has risen about 5.4 times since then (our calculation from [5][6]).

Unknown: What Vault B holds, what the full inventory says, and whether the gold Rai’s audit flagged was ever lost [1][10].

For a public treasure on this scale, that’s a striking amount of fog. India’s central bank publishes how much gold it holds and where it keeps it, as our explainer on why RBI brought India’s gold home from London shows. The country’s best-known temple hoard has no published count at all.

An explainer for general reading, based on public records as of 12 November 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.