After 232 years of production, the US 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 each coin; Since each cent cost 3.69 cents to produce, the production process was almost four times more expensive than the value of the coin itself (1).
Since many consumers had come to view pennies as a nuisance, these coins were often discarded or thrown away. But when Trump made the penny announcement, people began collecting the newly minted coins under the assumption that they could be worth a lot of money.
Online sellers rushed to list boxes of new 2025 pennies for $1,000 or more, even though those boxes had a face value of only $25, according to The New York Post (2). One Louisiana radio station even encouraged its listeners to buy rolls of 50-cent coins at banks and sell them on eBay for up to $50 (3).
The pitch sounds convincing: acquire a “collector’s item” early before it disappears forever. But currency experts say anyone paying these inflated prices for pennies is probably wasting their money.
“Whenever there are stories about coins, scammers come out and take advantage of the headlines,” John Feigenbaum, executive director of the Guild of Professional Numismatists and CEO of Whitman Publishing, told The Post. It estimates that the U.S. Mint produced approximately one billion pennies in 2025 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 dime for more than it’s worth, so consumers probably shouldn’t either. Furthermore, the inflated prices appearing on eBay and Etsy do not reflect genuine value to the collector: they are just seller exaggerations seeking to exploit public confusion.
The situation reflects the madness of the 1976 bicentennial quarter, when Americans hoarded millions of redesigned quarters thinking they would become valuable. “Today they are still worth roughly face value,” Feigenbaum noted with The Post. “Scarcity is scarcity; if you get a billion of something, it’s not rare.”
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However, there is a really valuable 2025 penny product out there.
The United States Mint produced 232 special omega-marked pennies in Philadelphia, as well as another 232 in Denver, to accompany the 232 gold versions commemorating the end of the denomination. These will be auctioned in December and could fetch between $10,000 and $20,000 each (2).
The last nickels ever minted also received special omega marks and will be auctioned separately. Feigenbaum estimates that these particular pennies could fetch between $2 million and $5 million each, according to USA Today (1).
Canada stopped minting pennies in 2012 and their experience offers a glimpse of what could happen to 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 more than a decade and applies only to copper pennies. APMEX notes that U.S. pennies minted after 1982 are composed of 97.5% zinc with only 2.5% copper plating, making them worth even less for their metal content than older 95% copper pennies (5).
During a period of real financial stress for many Americans—with grocery bills, health care costs and housing expenses putting pressure on budgets—the promise of easy money by hoarding pennies can seem appealing.
But this is largely a distraction from real wealth creation strategies. If you’re looking to turn small amounts of money into financial gains, pennies are not the answer.
According to an analysis by Visual Capitalist, the S&P 500 posted gains of 23% in 2024, while rising 53% over the past two years, one of the index’s strongest biannual performances since the late 1990s (6).
Those returns came from simply investing in index funds or ETFs that track the performance of the S&P 500, without needing to travel to multiple banks or search through eBay listings.
The math speaks for itself: A $100 investment in an S&P 500 index fund in early 2024 would have been worth about $125 by the end of the year. Meanwhile, that same $100 spent on two rolls of 2025 pennies at inflated prices would still be worth only $1 in real 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.
