With the US government no longer making pennies, some people smell an opportunity to cash in on these discontinued coins
After 232 years of production, the U.S. Mint stamped its final batch of pennies on November 12, 2025.
In February, President Trump ordered the Treasury Department to stop minting pennies because the government was losing money on every coin — since it cost 3.69 cents to produce every penny, the production process was nearly four times more expensive than the value of the coin itself (1).
Since many consumers had come to see pennies as an annoyance, these coins were often discarded or thrown away. But when Trump made his penny announcement, people began collecting the freshly-minted coins on the assumption that they could be worth a lot of money.
Online sellers rushed to list boxes of brand-new 2025 pennies for $1,000 or more, despite those boxes having a face value of just $25, according to The New York Post (2). A Louisiana radio station even encouraged listeners to buy 50-cent rolls of pennies at banks and flip them on eBay for as much as $50 (3).
The pitch sounds compelling: get in early on a “collectible” before it disappears forever. But coin experts say anyone paying these inflated prices for pennies is likely wasting their money.
“Whenever there are stories about coins, scammers come along and take advantage of the headlines,” John Feigenbaum, executive director of the Professional Numismatists Guild and CEO of Whitman Publishing, told The Post. He estimates the U.S. Mint produced roughly a billion 2025 pennies before production ended, and that doesn’t even include the three-billion pennies that were minted in 2024.
As Feigenbaum warns, dealers simply won’t buy a penny for more than it’s worth, so consumers probably shouldn’t either. Furthermore, the inflated prices appearing on eBay and Etsy don’t reflect genuine collector value — just seller hype that seeks to exploit public confusion.
The situation mirrors the 1976 bicentennial quarter craze, when Americans hoarded millions of redesigned 25 cent coins thinking they’d become valuable. “Today they’re still worth around face value,” Feigenbaum noted with The Post. “Scarcity is scarcity — if you make a billion of something, it’s not rare.”
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There is, however, one genuinely valuable 2025 penny product.
The U.S. Mint produced 232 special omega-marked pennies in Philadelphia — as well as another 232 in Denver — to accompany the 232 gold versions that commemorate the denomination’s end. These will be auctioned in December and could fetch about $10,000 to $20,000 each (2).
The final five pennies ever minted also received special omega markings and will be auctioned separately. Feigenbaum estimates these particular pennies could fetch $2 to $5 million each, according to USA Today (1).
Canada stopped minting pennies in 2012, and its experience offers insight into what might happen with our pennies south of the border.
In an interview with CTV News, Todd Sandham — owner of Colonial Acres Coins in Kitchener, Ontario — revealed that pre-1997 Canadian pennies, which were largely made of copper, now sell for about three cents each as a commodity based on the value of copper (4).
But that modest appreciation took over a decade and applies only to copper pennies. APMEX notes that U.S. pennies minted after 1982 are composed of 97.5% zinc with just 2.5% copper plating, making them worth even less for their metal content than the older 95% copper pennies (5).
During a period of genuine financial strain for many Americans — with grocery bills, health care costs and housing expenses squeezing budgets — the promise of easy money from hoarding pennies can sound appealing.
But this is largely a distraction from actual wealth-building strategies. If you’re looking to turn small amounts of money into financial gains, penny rolls aren’t the answer.
According to analysis from Visual Capitalist, the S&P 500 saw gains of 23% in 2024 while climbing 53% over the past two years — one of the index’s strongest two-year performances since the late 1990s (6).
Those returns came from simply investing in index funds or ETFs that track the S&P 500’s performance, with no trips to multiple banks or scouring eBay listings required.
The math speaks for itself: a $100 investment in an S&P 500 index fund at the start of 2024 would have been worth approximately $125 by year’s end. Meanwhile, that same $100 spent on two rolls of 2025 pennies at inflated prices would still be worth just $1 in actual currency.
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USA Today (1); New York Post (2); 97.3 The Dawg (3); CTV News (4); APMEX (5); Visual Capitalist (6)
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
