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On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 12, 2025, at the United States Mint in Philadelphia, US Treasurer Brandon Beach stepped up to a coin press and struck the final circulating Lincoln cent in a 232-year run. Each penny coming off that line had cost the federal government 3.69 cents to make and distribute. The Mint had been losing money on the coin for nineteen consecutive years.
Canada had reached the same conclusion in 2013, when the cost of each Canadian cent had only climbed to 1.6 cents — less than half what the American penny would eventually cost. Twelve years separated the two decisions. In that interval, the US Mint pressed billions of pennies at a rising per-unit loss the Treasury has never aggregated into a single public line item.
The math that finally broke the case
The penny’s per-coin cost first crossed face value in 2006, when production climbed from 0.97 cents in 2005 to 1.23 cents the following year. Zinc and copper prices were spiking, pushed by industrial demand out of China and a tightening supply of refined metals. The coin’s input costs followed.
By the Mint’s last accounting, the cost had reached 3.69 cents per penny, up from 1.42 cents a decade earlier. The Federal Reserve lost $85.3 million in fiscal 2024 minting the 3.2 billion pennies the Mint shipped that year. The Treasury expects stopping production to save $56 million annually in reduced material costs.
Canada had run its arithmetic earlier and on simpler grounds. The Royal Canadian Mint pressed its last circulating cent on May 4, 2012, and stopped distributing pennies to financial institutions on February 4, 2013. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty cited the 1.6-cent production cost, the steady accumulation of unspent coins in Canadian households, and the handling costs imposed on retailers and banks. The original estimated taxpayer savings was $11 million a year; later CBC reporting revised the actual figure to roughly $4 million a year over six years, once redemption and handling costs were counted.
What a penny is actually made of
The modern Lincoln cent is 97.5 percent zinc with a 2.5 percent copper plating. It looks like copper. By weight, it is almost entirely zinc. The Mint shifted the coin’s composition repeatedly across the twentieth century to keep production viable, with a wartime switch in 1943 — copper went to the war effort, and pennies that year were struck in zinc-coated steel. The big modern composition shift came in 1982, when the bronze alloy that had defined the coin for most of its life was replaced with zinc cores and copper plating.
The composition kept changing because the metal kept costing more than the coin. Zinc futures, copper futures, fuel for the Philadelphia and Denver presses, and labor costs all moved in the same direction. The face value stayed put at one cent because Congress sets coin specifications, and Congress had passed no penny-elimination bill in two decades of trying.
The denominations that pay for themselves
The penny was not the only money-loser in the tray. The nickel is worse on a per-unit basis. Each five-cent coin cost the Mint 13.78 cents to produce and distribute in 2024, almost triple its face value. The Mint shipped far fewer nickels than pennies that year, so the aggregate bleed was smaller, but the unit math is sharper.
Dimes and quarters are the workhorses that keep the Mint’s books from looking worse. The dime costs about 5.76 cents to make and distribute against a 10-cent face value. The quarter costs about 14.68 cents and returns 25. America turned a profit of $36 million on dimes and $166 million on quarters in 2024.
Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society, framed the underlying dynamic plainly in widely syndicated reporting: “Through history, all governments have had this problem that it’s very cost-effective to make a big piece of money. But what the ordinary people need is small money. That is the conflict.”
A dollar coin would be the most profitable line item of all, by a wide margin, if Americans used dollar coins. They do not.
The rounding problem
With the penny gone, cash transactions are being rounded to the nearest nickel. Card and digital transactions remain priced to the exact cent. The math is straightforward: prices ending in .01 or .02 round down to .00, .03 or .04 round up to .05, .06 or .07 round down to .05, and .08 or .09 round up to .10. Canada adopted the same symmetrical-rounding scheme in 2013.
The split creates a two-tier payment system the federal government has not formally addressed. Rob Karr, president and CEO of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, wrote in a Tribune News Service column distributed through the Chicago Tribune that cash customers and card customers paying the same posted price can owe different totals at the register, putting retailers in conflict with federal law. The Treasury has issued no binding guidance. The Common Cents Act, sponsored by Lisa McClain and Robert Garcia to set symmetrical rounding nationally, has passed the House Financial Services Committee but not the full chamber.
In the meantime, states are improvising. Bills setting rounding rules have passed both chambers and await the governor’s signature in Arizona, Florida, Oregon, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington. Multiple state and local cash-acceptance laws could prohibit asymmetric rounding entirely.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond has modeled the net consumer impact at about $6 million a year in rounding losses across the country — what Richmond Fed researchers call a “rounding tax.” Transactions are statistically more likely to end in digits that round up than down. The burden falls hardest on low-income and older Americans, who use cash more often than younger and wealthier consumers.
The indirect cost is larger. Consumers who want to avoid the rounding question can tap or swipe instead of paying cash. Card processors collected more than $172 billion in payment processing fees from American retailers in 2023, most of which gets passed through to consumers as higher posted prices. Every transaction that migrates from cash to card adds to the merchant’s cost of goods sold on that sale.
The billions still in circulation
The Mint has stopped pressing, but the pennies have not disappeared. The Treasury estimates roughly 300 billion pennies remain in circulation, more accurately described as resting in jars, drawers, vacuum cleaner canisters, and the gaps between couch cushions. A New York Times Magazine analysis in 2024 put the figure closer to 240 billion. Most existing pennies will spend the rest of their working lives sitting still.
Pennies remain legal tender. A retailer who refuses them is technically refusing valid US currency, though there is no federal law requiring private businesses to accept any particular form of payment. Most retailers will accept them. Some — Wendy’s, certain McDonald’s locations, the Midwest convenience chain Kwik Trip — already round cash transactions to the nearest nickel rather than chase pennies. The shortage in cash registers has been described by the Retail Industry Leaders Association as accelerating exponentially through the back half of 2025.
The Royal Canadian Mint redeemed more than seven billion Canadian pennies in the decade after its phase-out. Many were melted for their metal content. The US Mint will continue striking commemorative versions of the Lincoln cent for collectors, but no new circulating one-cent coins will leave Philadelphia or Denver again.
The nickel sits on a longer clock
The nickel’s eventual elimination is widely considered likely, though no Treasury timeline exists. The economic case is sharper than the case against the penny: each nickel costs 13.78 cents to produce. But ending the nickel forces rounding to the nearest dime, and the math gets uglier fast. As Wartenberg Kagan put it: “Let’s say something costs $4.91, and you can only pay $5. That’s a difference of 9 cents. So, that is a lot of money if you add it up.”
There is also a paradox. With the penny gone, the Mint will need to press more nickels to fill the gap at the bottom of the change stack. CNN has reported that an increase of only 850,000 nickels would negate the savings from ending the penny. Industry estimates of the actual demand surge run closer to two million additional nickels. The savings from killing one money-losing coin can be eaten by ramping production of another.
Government researchers have spent years studying ways to reduce nickel production cost, presumably by switching to a cheaper alloy. The goal is the same one the Mint chased for decades with the penny: get the per-coin cost below face value. The Mint has not announced any breakthrough.
Nineteen years of unprofitable pressing
From 2006 to 2025, the US Mint pressed billions of pennies at a per-unit loss, knowing the books would not balance, because the Federal Reserve kept ordering pennies, because banks kept ordering pennies, because retailers needed pennies to make change for prices ending in .99. The .99 trick — the perception that $4.99 reads cheaper than $5.00 — required pennies in the till. The Mint subsidized the trick for nineteen consecutive years.
That run ended on a Wednesday afternoon in November, when the final circulating Lincoln cent rolled off a press in Philadelphia, was photographed, and was logged into the Mint’s records. Three hundred billion of its predecessors will keep circulating, slowly, for years. The last ones will end up where most pennies eventually end up — at the bottom of a Coinstar tray, sorted with the other zinc, and bound for the smelter.