Gold futures rollover: contract months, expiration and continuous charts

CME Group lists GC for the current month, the next two months, every February, April, August and October within 23 months and every June and December within 72 months; it identifies February, April, June, August and December as the active months (GC specs). Micro Gold (MGC) is listed in February, April, June, August, October and December (MGC specs).

Both GC and MGC are physically delivered. For GC, trading terminates on the third last business day of the delivery month and delivery can occur on any business day of that month; MGC delivers an "ACE" representing a share of a 100-ounce bar (CME Group). Because a long position can be assigned delivery once the delivery period starts, speculative traders typically close or roll before it. Brokers often set their own earlier cut-off — check yours.

The archive stores, for each session, the single outright contract with the most volume that day (calendar spreads are not eligible). The table shows the resulting switches.

Two things stand out. First, each switch happened in the last days of the month before delivery, e.g. from the February contract to April on January 28. Second, the archive skipped October: on July 29 it moved from August straight to December, consistent with October not being an active month.

Data correction — Jul 28, 2026. On that session the most-traded GC instrument was the August–December calendar spread (GCQ6-GCZ6), and the archive briefly stored those spread prices. On Oct 24, 2026 the session was rebuilt from the original exchange data as the most-traded outright contract, GCQ6. It is now a normal session and is included in the tables and statistics on these guides.

A later delivery month normally prices above a nearer one because holding gold until then has financing and storage costs. That difference appears at each roll in an unadjusted chart. In the archive, the first open of the new GC contract was $39.0 above the old contract's last close on Jan 28 (GCG6 → GCJ6), $27.0 above the old contract's last close on Mar 27 (GCJ6 → GCM6), $33.2 above the old contract's last close on May 27 (GCM6 → GCQ6), $55.2 above the old contract's last close on Jul 29 (GCQ6 → GCZ6). On GC, $1.00 per ounce is $100 per contract. Those gaps mix carry with the normal overnight move, but they are not market moves you could have traded in one contract.

Practical rule: in an unadjusted series, do not carry a support or resistance level from the old contract into the new one without converting it, and avoid holding a simulated position across a roll date. The gold backtesting checklist builds this into session selection.