Exciting a metal by an ultrashort laser pulse, the electrons are driven out of thermal equilibrium, while the phonon system remains almost unaffected. During and after the irradiation, the electrons thermalize and transfer energy to the phonons. In this work, we investigate the electron-phonon coupling in gold. The dependence of the coupling strength on the phonon properties as well as the nonequilibrium electrons has been taken into account. For the phonon system, we utilize several phonon temperatures. For the electrons we apply different excitation scenarios depending on the laser fluence and the photon energy. We observe that for gold at electron temperatures below 2000 K, the phonon distribution may affect the coupling slightly. However, the electron distribution, especially under nonequilibrium conditions, governs the electron-phonon coupling factor significantly. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.