For the fifth year running, the world used more silver than it produced in 2025, and the World Silver Survey 2026 expects 2026 to extend that streak to six. The report, released in April by the Silver Institute and researched by the London consultancy Metals Focus, pegs the 2025 deficit at 40.3 million ounces and forecasts a wider gap of 46.3 million ounces this year. Each shortfall draws on above-ground stocks, leaving less metal readily available even as total inventories have held up. The survey attributes last year's record-breaking price run to a mix of that tight physical supply, strong investment demand, and a supportive macro backdrop. With silver now trading well off its January high, the question for 2026 is whether that tightness holds.

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Five years down, a sixth on the way

The deficit is the through-line of this year's survey. The Silver Institute's review of 2025 records it as the fifth consecutive year that total demand ran ahead of total supply. The annual gap of 40.3Moz was actually narrower than the year before, because high prices pulled in more metal: mine production rose 3% to 846.6Moz, and recycling climbed to a 12-year high of 197.6Moz, while demand eased 2% to 1.13 billion ounces.

That supply response is not expected to repeat. Metals Focus sees mine production holding roughly flat in 2026 and the annual deficit widening to 46.3Moz, which would be the sixth shortfall in a row. When we charted this series last year on the 2025 survey's data, the record showed five straight deficits stretching back to a surplus-to-deficit flip in 2021. This year's report confirms that fifth shortfall and pushes the forecast to a sixth, which keeps the deficit a relatively young but now firmly entrenched feature of the market.

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Why a small annual gap still matters

Set against roughly 1.1 billion ounces of yearly demand, a 40 to 46Moz deficit reads as a rounding error. The survey's point is about accumulation rather than any single year. Every deficit removes net metal from the pool of available silver, and the report tallies that running drawdown at 762.1 million ounces since 2021. A narrower deficit slows the drain. It does not put metal back.

The pressure shows up less in the total inventory count than in how much of it is actually free to trade. Total identifiable stocks rose in 2025, but a growing share sat locked inside exchange-traded products or in exchange vaults rather than circulating in London. According to the survey, that thinning of available metal is what turned an otherwise ordinary year into a stress event. In October 2025, falling free-float inventories, a shift of metal into CME vaults, rising holdings in exchange-traded products, and a jump in physical demand pushed London lease rates sharply higher, in what the report calls an unprecedented liquidity squeeze.

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Where demand fell, and where it held

Total demand slipped in 2025, yet the market stayed in deficit because the losses landed in the segments most sensitive to price. The survey's figures show industrial demand down 3% to 657.4Moz, as solar manufacturers thrifted and substituted away from silver faster than gains from AI infrastructure, autos, and power-grid spending could offset. Jewelry fell 8%, with India down 20%, and silverware dropped 21%. Working the other way was investment, where coin and net bar demand rose 14%, a recovery we looked at in more detail in a separate piece.

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What the 2026 forecast depends on

The survey's sixth-deficit call rests on a fairly specific set of assumptions: flat mine supply, more price-driven weakness in jewelry, silverware, and solar, and investment demand holding up well enough to keep consumption above production. The report is careful to frame its constructive view as conditional, citing a contained geopolitical backdrop and the chance that recent pressure from rising US rate expectations proves temporary. It stops short of a formal price forecast.