What is my US coin worth?

What decides the value of a coin

Start with the denomination and the year, because together they fix the metal. The Mint changed metals several times, each time because a metal had become worth more than the coin it was in. Silver left the dime and the quarter after 1964 under the Coinage Act of 1965 and the half dollar after 1970. The cent went from 95% copper to copper-plated zinc during 1982, and the nickel briefly held silver during the Second World War, from October 1942 to the end of 1945, when nickel was reserved for the war effort. Those dates split your change into two piles: coins worth more than face value as metal, and coins worth face value.

Then comes the mint mark, the small letter that says where the coin was struck: D for Denver, S for San Francisco, O for New Orleans, CC for Carson City, W for West Point, and either P or no letter at all for Philadelphia. The mark matters because mints worked to very different scales. The same year can give one coin struck by the hundreds of millions in Denver and its twin struck by the hundred thousand in San Francisco. The mint marks guide shows where the letter sits on each coin and which years carry none at all.

Last comes the number struck at that mint, and here the official tables do the work. The Bureau of the Mint published in 1981 the count of every coin made at every mint, year by year, from 1793 to 1980. This site transcribed the tables for the coins people still find, checked each column against the printed totals, and joined the Mint’s production reports for the State quarters of 1999 to 2008 and for the years 2010 to 2012 and 2016 to 2023. That is the figure the checker shows in the line “Struck at this mint”.

Melt value: what the metal is worth

Melt value is the market value of the metal a coin contains, here worked out from the coin’s official weight and alloy and a public price. A 90% silver quarter weighs 6.25 grams and holds 0.1808 troy ounce of pure silver. At $53.94 an ounce that is about $9.76, many times its face value. The same arithmetic on a modern clad quarter gives 8.3¢ of copper and nickel. The calculator below takes any kind of coin and any quantity, with the silver and copper prices of the moment; you can type your own price instead.

Two limits apply. First, a melt value is not an offer: someone buying coins for their metal has costs, and the price you are offered can differ from the result. Second, pennies and nickels cannot legally be melted: the coin regulations at 31 CFR Part 82 ban melting, treating or exporting them, with an exception for the wartime silver nickels. For bags and rolls of pre-1965 silver, the junk silver page converts a face value straight into ounces: every dollar of face value in 90% dimes, quarters or halves holds 0.7234 troy ounce of silver. The full melt value calculator has a page of its own.

Is it silver? The years to remember

The silver years are easy to check without a scale. Look at the edge of a dime, quarter or half: a copper stripe between two grey layers means clad, a solid silver-grey edge means silver. Then confirm with the date. Dimes and quarters dated 1964 or earlier are 90% silver. Halves are 90% silver to 1964 and 40% silver from 1965 to 1970. Dollars were 90% silver through 1935; after that, the circulating dollars contain no silver, and only some Eisenhower dollars sold to collectors were made with 40% silver. Nickels hold silver only in the war years, recognisable by the large mint mark above Monticello’s dome.

The silver coin years page lists every case, including the 1976 Bicentennial quarters, halves and dollars struck in 40% silver for collector sets. Each denomination also has its own page: silver dimes, silver quarters, Kennedy halves, Morgan dollars and Peace dollars.

Rarity: what the mintage tells you, and what it does not

A coin is scarce first because few were made. The checker places each figure in a band, from very low (under one million) to very high (over 200 million). Those bands are a reading aid set by this site, not a grading of value. They point you to the coins worth a closer look: among Lincoln cents, the lowest figures in the Mint tables are 1931-S (866,000), 1914-D (1,193,000), 1924-D (2,520,000), 1909-S (2,618,000); among dimes since 1916, 1916-D (264,000), 1921-D (1,080,000), 1921 (1,230,000).

A low mintage is not the whole story. Some coins were struck in large numbers and later melted, so few survive. Others had small mintages but were saved by collectors from the start. Condition multiplies everything: a scarce date that has been cleaned or worn smooth may be worth little more than its metal, while a common date in perfect condition can be worth a premium. This is why the site gives facts you can verify, mintage, metal and melt value, and leaves out prices it cannot source. The rare pennies and rare quarters pages rank the lowest figures and explain the traps, including the calendar-year counting that mixes two designs in a changeover year.

Mistakes made at the Mint are the other way a coin becomes valuable. Doubled dies, coins struck on the wrong metal and missing mint marks are listed in the error coins guide, each with what to look for and the size of the issue it hides in. The Mint does not count varieties separately, so the figure shown is that of the whole issue: a doubled die from a year of hundreds of millions is still rare, because only one die was affected.

The end of the penny

On November 12, 2025, the Mint struck its final circulating one-cent coin at Philadelphia, ending a 232-year run. The Mint’s announcement gives the reason in numbers: each penny had come to cost 3.69 cents to make, against 1.42 cents a decade earlier. The Secretary of the Treasury used the authority of 31 U.S.C. 5111 and 5112 to stop production once it was no longer needed, and the Mint expects to save about $56 million a year. Pennies stay legal tender: about 300 billion are still out there, shops can keep their one-cent prices, and collector pennies are still made.

The end of production does not make ordinary pennies rare: billions remain and no new ones are needed. It does make the old copper cents, dated 1981 or earlier, a curiosity, since their metal is worth more than a cent. The penny end page explains what changes for shoppers and the saving pennies page weighs whether a jar of cents is worth sorting.

Condition: the part only you can judge

Two coins with the same date, mint and mintage can be worth very different amounts because of wear. US grading services rate coins on a scale from 1 to 70, where 60 and above means no wear from circulation. You do not need a grade to use this site, but a few habits protect value: hold coins by the edge, never clean or polish them, and keep them in a soft holder rather than loose in a jar. The grading guide turns those rules into a short quiz, with a calculator that compares a grading fee to what grading could add.

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