A wide range of metals can be electroplated, from everyday options like zinc, nickel, and copper to precious metals like gold, silver, and platinum. The process works by dissolving metal ions in a solution and using electrical current to deposit them onto a surface, so any metal that can be dissolved into an electrolyte and reduced at a cathode is a candidate. In practice, about a dozen metals and several alloys account for nearly all commercial electroplating.
The Most Common Electroplating Metals
These metals make up the bulk of industrial and consumer electroplating. Each one brings specific properties to the finished part.
- Zinc: The workhorse of corrosion protection. Steel bolts, fasteners, brackets, and automotive body parts are frequently zinc-plated to prevent rust. Zinc sacrifices itself to protect the underlying steel, corroding first so the base metal stays intact.
- Nickel: Adds hardness, wear resistance, and a bright finish. Nickel plating shows up on tools, faucets, and industrial components. It also serves as an intermediate layer beneath other finishes, acting as a barrier that improves adhesion and prevents metals from migrating through the coating.
- Copper: Valued for its excellent electrical conductivity, copper plating is standard in electronics and circuit boards. It also works as a base layer before other metals are applied, improving adhesion and providing a smooth foundation. Manufacturers often layer copper and nickel together to maximize both strength and conductivity.
- Chromium: Best known for the mirror-bright “chrome” finish on car bumpers, motorcycle parts, and bathroom fixtures. Chromium plating is extremely hard and resists scratching, but it’s typically applied as a very thin layer over nickel. Restoration shops and vehicle customization businesses rely on chrome plating heavily.
These four metals handle the majority of functional electroplating, where the goal is corrosion resistance, conductivity, or durability rather than appearance alone.
Precious Metals
Gold, silver, rhodium, and platinum can all be electroplated, though the economics push these toward applications where a thin coating delivers outsized value.
Gold plating is common in electronics, where even a fraction of a micrometer of gold on a connector ensures reliable electrical contact and corrosion resistance. Decorative gold plating on jewelry typically runs 0.5 to 1 micrometer thick, while higher-quality pieces use 5 micrometers or more. Gold plating also appears in dentistry, where it’s used to create tooth inlays. For rose gold finishes, gold is combined with copper and silver during the plating process to shift the hue.
Silver plating provides the highest electrical conductivity of any metal, making it useful for wires, contacts, and RF shielding. Coatings tend to be thicker than gold, usually 1 to 5 micrometers, because silver oxidizes more readily and needs extra material to stay protective.
Rhodium is plated in extremely thin layers, often just 0.05 to 0.2 micrometers. Despite its thinness, rhodium delivers a bright white finish and exceptional scratch resistance, which is why it’s the standard topcoat on white gold jewelry. Platinum electroplating exists but is less common and more expensive, with coatings typically starting around 1 micrometer.
Other Industrial Metals
Beyond the most popular choices, several other metals see regular use in electroplating for specialized purposes.
- Tin: Frequently plated onto food-contact surfaces and electronic components. Tin is non-toxic, solderable, and resists corrosion, making it a natural fit for canning and circuit board finishes.
- Cadmium: Once a go-to for aerospace fasteners because of its excellent corrosion resistance and natural lubricity. However, cadmium is toxic and behaves poorly in space: it sublimates in hard vacuum (especially above 75°C), and its conductive vapors can redeposit and cause short circuits. NASA now prohibits cadmium plating on electronic parts and spaceflight hardware. Zinc-nickel alloy plating has largely replaced it in aerospace applications.
- Iron: Plated for wear resistance and to rebuild worn machine parts back to their original dimensions.
- Brass: An alloy of copper and zinc that can be co-deposited from a single bath. Commercial brass plating comes in different compositions: yellow brass at roughly 70% copper, white brass at about 30% copper, and copper-rich brass at around 90% copper. Each blend produces a different color and set of properties.
- Titanium: Listed among commercially plated metals, though it requires more specialized bath chemistry than most.
Alloy Plating
Electroplating isn’t limited to single metals. By dissolving two or more metals in the same bath, you can deposit alloys with properties that neither metal offers alone. Zinc-nickel is one of the most important examples, offering corrosion protection that significantly outperforms pure zinc. It has become the standard replacement for cadmium in aerospace fasteners as environmental regulations have tightened.
Other co-deposited alloys include copper-zinc (brass), copper-tin (bronze), and various nickel alloys combined with metals like cobalt for added hardness. The ability to fine-tune alloy composition by adjusting bath chemistry and electrical parameters gives manufacturers a surprising amount of control over the final coating’s color, hardness, and corrosion performance.
Refractory Metals: The Hard-to-Plate Group
Metals like tungsten, molybdenum, tantalum, and niobium can technically be electroplated, but they require dramatically different conditions than standard metals. These refractory metals cannot be deposited from ordinary water-based solutions. Instead, they require molten salt baths operating at temperatures between 400°C and 1,000°C.
Among this group, molybdenum and titanium have received the most research attention for electroplating. Tantalum, niobium, and tungsten are also deposited this way, but mostly in specialized industrial or research settings rather than everyday manufacturing. Current densities in these cells run about ten times lower than in conventional plating to keep the deposited layer smooth and stable. Alloys like molybdenum-niobium, nickel-tantalum, and nickel-niobium have also been electrodeposited from molten salts, expanding the range of achievable coatings for extreme-environment applications.
What Can Be Plated Onto
The question of which metals can be electroplated also depends on what you’re coating. The substrate (the object receiving the plating) needs to be conductive, or it needs to be made conductive through surface treatment.
Steel is the most widely plated substrate because of its strength, low cost, and availability. Low-carbon steels accept coatings readily after cleaning and surface activation. Copper, brass, bronze, aluminum, stainless steel, and zinc die-cast parts are also commonly plated. Each comes with quirks: brass and bronze contain zinc that can leach into the plating bath or migrate through the coating, causing discoloration. A nickel barrier layer solves this. Stainless steel and aluminum naturally form thin oxide layers that block electrical contact, so they need extra preparation steps to strip that barrier before plating.
Even non-metals can be electroplated. Plastics and ceramics are plated routinely in electronics, automotive, and aerospace manufacturing to reduce component weight while adding conductivity and strength. Since plastics don’t conduct electricity, they undergo chemical surface treatments that deposit an ultra-thin conductive seed layer, typically copper or nickel, before conventional electroplating can proceed. This is how chrome-finished plastic trim pieces on cars are made, and how 3D-printed plastic prototypes get plated in copper, silver, or gold to achieve a metal finish.
How Thickness Is Controlled
The amount of metal deposited during electroplating follows a straightforward relationship: the mass of metal plated is proportional to the electrical current applied and the time it runs. Double the current or double the time, and you deposit roughly twice as much metal. The specific amount also depends on the metal’s atomic weight and how many electrons each atom needs to deposit.
In practice, this means platers can dial in very precise thicknesses. Zinc coatings on steel fasteners come in standardized thickness classes to match different corrosion-resistance requirements. Decorative gold might be under a micrometer, while functional gold on electronics connectors might be several micrometers. Rhodium coatings work at a fraction of a micrometer because the metal is so hard and expensive that a little goes a long way. This precision is one of the reasons electroplating remains the dominant surface-finishing method across industries, from jewelry to aerospace.