Why gilts pay a fixed amount of cash
A conventional gilt pays a fixed coupon in pounds because the amount is written into its terms at issue, and the real return on that fixed cash depends on the inflation that follows.
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Guides to gilts and to using GiltIQ, written against the site's own data and pages.
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A gilt and a corporate bond on one cash-flow basis
A gilt and a corporate bond both pay a fixed coupon and repay a nominal, so putting them on one cash-flow basis shows the yield gap between government and company borrowing.
Treasury bills and gilts: how short government debt differs
A Treasury bill is short-dated government borrowing that pays no coupon and is bought at a discount to face value, while a gilt pays a coupon over a longer life — and the two are measured on different yield conventions.
Why gilt prices move when yields change
A gilt's price falls when its yield rises and rises when its yield falls, because a fixed coupon has to be repriced to match what the market now demands — and the Change column shows that movement.
Gilt strips and zero-coupon exposure
A gilt strip separates a gilt's individual coupon payments and final repayment into stand-alone securities that each pay only at a set date, so a strip behaves like a zero-coupon bond.
How conventional and index-linked gilts differ
Conventional gilts pay the same cash coupon whatever happens to prices, while index-linked gilts scale both the coupon and the repayment by the index ratio so the cash keeps pace with measured inflation.
Nominal value and market value: what a gilt is worth
A gilt's nominal value is the £100 per unit it repays at maturity, while its market value is what the price you pay makes it worth — and the two are rarely the same number.
Guides
Gilt jargon in plain English
A plain-English glossary of the terms a gilt list uses — coupon, clean price, accrued interest, dirty price, yield and more — so each column name maps to a figure the page computes.
What a coupon actually pays
A coupon is a fixed percentage of nominal paid twice a year, and the cash it pays stays the same whatever the gilt's price — which is why the coupon and the yield answer different questions.
What a gilt actually is
A gilt is a loan to the UK government that pays a fixed coupon for its life and repays £100 of nominal at maturity, so owning one means owning a known stream of cash rather than a share of anything.
Reading a gilt quote: clean, accrued and dirty
A gilt quote shows three prices — the clean price, the accrued interest and the dirty price — and reading a single row means telling apart what the gilt is worth, what interest has built up, and what a buyer actually pays.
What a gilt holds and what it returns
Holding a gilt means owning a fixed stream of coupon payments and a £100 nominal repayment at maturity, and what that holding returns depends on the price paid for the stream.