The stopping cross section of He ions in gold has been measured at incident energies from 0.4 MeV–1.9 MeV. A backscattering technique was used to measure the energy loss in gold films which had been vacuum evaporated on sapphire substrates. The stopping cross section results are compared with the previous data of Wilcox, Gobeli and Nakata. Brice's semi-empirical formula has been fit to the data with a resultant root-mean-square percentage deviation of 0.6 per cent.