Tola, Maund, Seer, Chatank: Pakistan's Traditional Weight Units Explained

Walk into any jewellery shop in Pakistan and ask for gold, and you'll almost certainly hear the price quoted per tola, not per gram. These traditional South Asian weight units remain in everyday practical use, even in an officially metric country.

Tola — the gold-trade standard

The tola is the unit most Pakistanis encounter regularly, since it's the standard measure for gold and silver pricing. The modern standardized tola equals 11.6638 grams — a figure fixed precisely enough that it's used consistently across the gold trade in Pakistan, India, and beyond, regardless of regional variation in other traditional units.

Seer, maund, and chatank — the broader scale

These units form a coherent traditional weight system, each defined as a multiple of the others: 1 seer equals 80 tola (about 933 grams), and 1 maund equals 40 seer (about 37.3 kilograms) — historically the standard unit for bulk goods like grain, sugar, or produce at wholesale/mandi level. The chatank is a smaller unit, 1/16 of a seer (about 58 grams), used for smaller everyday quantities.

Why these units persist

Unlike Pakistan's land-area units (where Marla genuinely differs by region and convention), the weight-unit system is comparatively stable and well-standardized — which is likely part of why it has persisted so robustly in commerce, particularly gold trading, decades after official metrication. A jeweller quoting "tola rate" and a customer understanding it instantly is simply more efficient than converting through grams for a transaction both sides already think in tola terms.

Converting between systems

Whether you're checking a gold price, following a traditional recipe measured in seer, or just curious how a maund compares to a modern kilogram, our Unit Converter handles all of these — tola, maund, seer, chatank — alongside standard metric and imperial units, all in one place.

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