If you are cleaning out an old desk drawer and come across a dusty keyboard and mouse, the question is a fair one: do the small circuit boards inside them actually contain gold? The short answer is yes, but the useful answer is a little more complicated. Keyboards and mice are not the richest source of gold in a computer, and knowing where the gold sits, how much is really there, and what it is realistically worth will save you from a lot of wasted effort.
Yes, the circuit boards in keyboards and mice do carry gold
Inside nearly every keyboard and mouse is a small printed circuit board, often called a PCB for short. Gold shows up on these boards in a handful of specific places: the connector pins and ribbon contacts where the board plugs into the rest of the device, the contact pads beneath the keys, and thin gold plating on traces in better-quality models. Manufacturers use gold here for a practical reason. It is an excellent conductor, and unlike copper it does not tarnish or corrode with age, so it keeps a reliable electrical connection for years of clicking and typing.
That said, keyboards and mice are built to be cheap and mass-produced. In many budget models, the switch contacts are printed with a silver or carbon-based paste rather than real gold, and only the connector fingers carry a thin gold plating. As a result, the gold on a mouse or keyboard circuit board is present but measured in tiny fractions, nowhere near the amount found on a motherboard, a CPU, or a stick of RAM.
The honest reality of how much gold is there
It helps to put the numbers in perspective. A single desktop computer holds roughly a tenth to a third of a gram of gold in total, and the bulk of that is concentrated on the motherboard, CPU, and RAM contacts rather than on the keyboard or mouse. The tiny circuit boards in the mouse and keyboard account for only a small fraction of that figure. Recover all of the gold from a single keyboard's circuit board and you would be left with an amount too small to weigh on a normal scale.
This is not the same thing as saying the gold is not there. It is simply not present in a quantity that makes mining it from one device worth the trouble.
Why pulling the gold out by hand is a bad idea
Recovering gold from printed circuit boards at home usually means treating them with strong acids or cyanide-based solutions, or melting them down over an open flame. These methods are slow, genuinely dangerous to work around without proper equipment, and produce very little gold for a single keyboard or mouse. The chemicals, gloves, and time it takes to process even a dozen boards can easily cost more than the tiny amount of metal you get back. For these small boards, hand extraction simply does not pay.
The real value is in other materials and in scale
A keyboard and mouse are worth recycling, just not only for their gold. Their boards contain copper, and the housings contain aluminium and recyclable plastics that are easy to reprocess. More importantly, collecting keyboards, mice, and countless other small electronics together creates the volume that makes recycling equipment worthwhile. What does not pay for one device becomes practical when thousands of small boards are fed through a proper plant.
At scale, those collected boards are processed with professional machines rather than acid baths. A circuit board recycling equipment line crushes and grinds the boards, then separates the metal-rich fraction from the non-metal material using gravity and either dry air or water separation. This is how copper powder and trace precious metals are recovered cleanly and safely from boards of all kinds, without releasing toxic fumes into the air.
So what should you do with old keyboards and mice?
For a single household device, the smartest move is to set it aside with the rest of your e-waste and let a licensed recycler handle it. They pool your keyboard and mouse in with circuit boards from dozens of other products, and that combined stream is exactly what makes professional recovery economical. In short, old keyboard and mouse circuit boards do contain gold, but only in trace amounts. The metal is real, the professional recycling route is the one that gets it out, and your time and safety are better spent letting the machines do the work.
