Nov. 12, 2025:
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The U.S. Mint in Philadelphia is set to strike its last circulating penny on Wednesday (Nov. 12, 2025) as the president has canceled the 1-cent coin.
President Donald Trump has ordered its demise as costs climb to nearly 4 cents per penny and the 1-cent valuation becomes somewhat obsolete.
The U.S. Mint has been making pennies in Philadelphia, the nation’s birthplace, since 1793, a year after Congress passed the Coinage Act. Today, there are billions of them in circulation, but they are rarely essential for financial transactions in the modern economy or the digital age.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,” Trump wrote in an online post in February, as costs continued to climb. “This is so wasteful!”
Still, many people have a nostalgia for them, seeing them as lucky or fun to collect. And some retailers have voiced concerns in recent weeks as supplies ran low and the last production neared. They said the phase-out was abrupt and came with no guidance from the federal government on how to handle customer transactions.
Some rounded prices down to avoid shortchanging people, others pleaded with customers to bring exact change and the more creative among them gave out prizes, such as a free drink, in exchange for a pile of pennies.
“We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go,” Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores said last month.
Some banks, meanwhile, began rationing supplies, a somewhat paradoxical result of the effort to address what many see as a glut of the coins. Over the last century, about half of the coins made at U.S. Mints in Philadelphia and Denver have been pennies.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasurer Brandon Beach were expected to be in Philadelphia on Wednesday afternoon for the final production run. The Treasury Department expects to save $56 million per year on materials by ceasing to make them.
But they still have a better production-cost-to-value ratio than the nickel, which costs nearly 14 cents to make. The diminutive dime, by comparison, costs less than 6 cents to produce and the quarter nearly 15 cents.
Back in 1793, a penny could get you a biscuit, a candle or a piece of candy. These days, many sit in drawers or glass jars and are basically cast aside or collected as lucky keepsakes.
No matter their face value, collectors and historians consider them an important record of society, one that can be traced back for more than 200 years. Frank Holt, an emeritus professor at the University of Houston who has studied the history of coins, laments the loss of that through line when it comes to the penny.
“We put mottos on them and self-identifiers and we decide — in the case of the United States — which dead persons are most important to us and should be commemorated,” he said. “They reflect our politics, our religion, our art, our sense of ourselves, our ideals, our aspirations.”
Oct. 30, 2025:
NEW YORK (AP) — The United States is running out of pennies.
President Donald Trump’s decision to stop producing the penny earlier this year is starting to have real implications for the nation’s commerce. Merchants in multiple regions of the country have run out of pennies and are unable to produce exact change. Meanwhile, banks are unable to order fresh pennies and are rationing pennies for their customers.
One convenience store chain, Sheetz, got so desperate for pennies that it briefly ran a promotion offering a free soda to customers who bring in 100 pennies. Another retailer says the lack of pennies will end up costing it millions this year, because of the need to round down to avoid lawsuits.
“It’s a chunk of change,” said Dylan Jeon, senior director of government relations with the National Retail Federation.
The penny problem started in late summer and is only getting worse as the country heads into the holiday shopping season.
To be sure, not one retailer or bank has called for the penny to stick around. Pennies, especially in bulk, are heavy and are more often than not used exclusively to give customers change. But the abrupt decision to get rid of the penny has come with no guidance from the federal government. Many stores have been left pleading for Americans to pay in exact change.
“We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go,” said Jeff Lenard with the National Association of Convenience Stores.
Trump announced on Feb. 9, 2025, that the U.S. would no longer mint pennies, citing the high costs. Both the penny and the nickel have been more expensive to produce than they are worth for several years, despite efforts by the U.S. Mint to reduce costs. The Mint spent 3.7 cents to make a penny in 2024, according to its most recent annual report, and it spends 13.8 cents to make a nickel.
“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nation’s budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The Treasury Department said in May that it was placing its last order of copper-zinc planchets — the blank metal disks that are minted into coins. In June, the last pennies were minted and by August, those pennies were distributed to banks and armored vehicle service companies.
Troy Richards, president and chief operations officer at Louisiana-based Guaranty Bank & Trust Co., said he’s had to scramble to have enough pennies on hand for his customers since August.
“We got an email announcement from the Federal Reserve that penny shipments would be curtailed. Little did we know that those shipments were already over for us,” Richards said.
Richards said the $1,800 in pennies the bank had were gone in two weeks. His branches are keeping small amounts of pennies for customers who need to cash checks, but that’s it.
The U.S. Mint issued 3.23 billion pennies in 2024, the last full year of production, more than double that of the second-most minted coin in the country: the quarter. But the problem with pennies is they are issued, given as change, and rarely recirculated back into the economy. Americans store their pennies in jars or use them for decoration. This requires the Mint to produce significant sums of pennies each year.
The government is expected to save $56 million by not minting pennies, according to the Treasury Department. Despite losing money on the penny, the Mint is profitable for the U.S. government through its production of other circulating coins as well as coin proof and commemorative sets that appeal to numismatic collectors.
In 2024, the Mint made $182 million in seigniorage, which is its equivalent of profit.
Besides American’s penny hoarding habit, a logistical issue is also preventing pennies from circulating.
The distribution of coins is handled by the Federal Reserve system. Several companies, mostly armored carrier companies, operate coin terminals where banks can withdraw and deposit coins. Roughly a third of these 170 coin terminals are now closed to both penny deposits as well as penny withdrawals.
Bank lobbyists say these terminals being closed to penny deposits is exacerbating the penny shortage, because parts of the country that may have some surplus pennies are unable to get those pennies to parts of country with shortages.
“As a result of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s decision to end production of the penny, coin distribution locations accepting penny deposits and fulfilling orders will vary over time as (penny) inventory is depleted” a Federal Reserve spokeswoman said.
The lack of pennies has also become a legal minefield for stores and retailers. In some states and cities, it is illegal to round up a transaction to the nearest nickel or dime because doing so would run afoul of laws that are supposed to place cash customers and debit and credit card customers on an equal playing field when it comes to item costs.
So, to avoid lawsuits, retailers are rounding down. While two or three cents may not seem like much, that extra change can add up over tens of thousands of transactions. A spokesman for Kwik Trip, the Midwest convenience store chain, says it has been rounding down every cash transaction to the nearest nickel. That’s expected to cost the company roughly $3 million this year. Some retailers are asking customers to give their change to local or affiliated charities at the cash register, in an effort to avoid pennies as well.
A bill currently pending in Congress, known as the Common Cents Act, calls for cash transactions to be rounded to the nearest nickel, up or down. While the proposal is palatable to businesses, rounding up could be costly for consumers.
The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment on whether they had any guidance for retailers or banks regarding the penny shortage, or the issues regarding penny circulation.
The United States is not the first country to transition away from small denomination coins or discontinue out-of-date coins. But in all of these cases, governments wound down the use of their out-of-date coins over a period of, often, years.
For example, Canada announced it would eliminate its one-cent coin in 2012, transitioning away from one-cent cash transactions starting in 2013 and is still redeeming and recycling one-cent coins a decade later. The “decimalization” process of converting British coins from farthings and shillings to a 100-pence-to-a-pound system took much of the 1960s and early 1970s.
The U.S. removed the penny from commerce abruptly, without any action by Congress or any regulatory guidance for banks, retailers or states. The retail and banking industries, rarely allies in Washington on policy matters related to point-of-sale, are demanding that Washington issue guidance or pass a law fixing the issues that are arising due to the shortage.
“We don’t want the penny back. We just want some sort of clarity from the federal government on what to do, as this issue is only going to get worse,” the NACS’ Lenard said.
May 22, 2025:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration says making cents doesn’t make sense anymore.
The U.S. Mint has made its final order of penny blanks and plans to stop producing the coin when those run out, a Treasury Department official confirmed Thursday (May 22, 2025). This move comes as the cost of making pennies has increased markedly, by upward of 20% in 2024, according to the Treasury.
By stopping the penny’s production, the Treasury expects an immediate annual savings of $56 million in reduced material costs, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the news.
In February, President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered his administration to cease production of the 1-cent coin.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump wrote at that time in a post on his Truth Social site. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
There are about 114 billion pennies currently in circulation in the United States — that’s $1.14 billion — but they are greatly underutilized, the Treasury says. The penny was one of the first coins made by the U.S. Mint after its establishment in 1792.
The nation’s treasury secretary has the authority to mint and issue coins “in amounts the secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States.”
Advocates for ditching the penny cite its high production cost — almost 4 cents per penny now, according to the U.S. Mint — and limited utility. Fans of the penny cite its usefulness in charity drives and relative bargain in production costs compared with the nickel, which costs almost 14 cents to mint.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
Pennies are the most popular coin made by the U.S. Mint, which reported making 3.2 billion of them last year. That’s more than half of all the new coins it made last year.
Congress, which dictates currency specifications such as the size and metal content of coins, could make Trump’s order permanent through law. But past congressional efforts to ditch the penny have failed.
Two bipartisan bills to kill the penny permanently were introduced this year.
Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., introduced the Make Sense Not Cents Act this month. In April, Reps. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., and Robert Garcia, D-Calif., along with Sens. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., introduced the Common Cents Act.
Jay Zagorsky, professor of markets, public policy, and law at Boston University, said that while he supports the move to end penny production, Congress must include language in any proposed legislation to require rounding up in pricing, which will eliminate the demand for pennies.
Zagorsky, who recently published a book called “The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money is Good for You and Society,” said otherwise simply ditching the penny will only increase demand for nickels, which are even more expensive, at 14 cents to produce.
“If we suddenly have to produce a lot of nickels — and we lose more money on producing every nickel — eliminating the penny doesn’t make any sense.”
Mark Weller, executive director of the Americans for Common Cents group — which conducts research and provides information to Congress and the Executive Branch on the value and benefits of the penny — says “there has been an evolution over the past six months that inevitably the production of the penny will be halted.”
His group advocates for the U.S. to find ways to reduce the cost of producing the nickel, especially since it will be more in demand once the penny is totally eliminated from circulation.
“It’s incumbent on Treasury to come up with a cheaper way to make the nickel,” Weller said. “Let’s make sure we’re making our coins as least expensively as possible and maintaining the option to use cash in transactions.”
March 6, 2025:
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump talks of big change in his second term of office. But he’s not forgetting small change, either.
Trump ordered the Treasury Department to stop making pennies with a Feb. 10, 2025, sentence on his social media account that followed years of conservatives pointing out that putting a copper-coated zinc disc in your pocket costs the government more than a cent — almost 4 cents today.
Will Trump’s order make the penny disappear? There is no sign that the U.S. Mint will stop pressing pennies in Denver and Philadelphia, and Mint officials did not respond to requests for clarification this week.
But the presidential penny pledge is already being felt in one niche world. It’s a little-known world that depends on buying pennies wholesale, loading them into machines and persuading parents to feed a few dollars into machines that stamp designs on the pennies — Paw Patrol, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — as they are stretched between metal rollers at fun fairs.
Small orbits of collectors and craftsmen have developed around them. And without the penny, the whole thing faces an uncertain future.
The last pennies?
New copper pennies vanished from circulation in 1982 — 73 years after the first Lincoln penny was minted — and were replaced by zinc-coated ones. The old ones are more pliable and easier to stamp, making them hot items for kids at fun fairs.
“They’ll clean ’em so when they elongate the dino or shark of the printed coin it maintains a ghost image of the printed head of Lincoln,” said Brian Peters, general manager of Minnesota-based Penny Press Machine Co. “Pre-1982 copper pennies, they bring those.”
Jeweler Angelo Rosato worked for decades in the 1960’s and ’70s hand-printing pennies with scenes of their New Milford, Connecticut, hometown and historical and sentimental scenes. Everything was obsessively catalogued, including more than 4,000 penny photographs.
“We’re big fans of the penny. Keep the penny,” said Aaron Zablow of Roseland, New Jersey, who was with two of his sons at the American Dream Mall.
“I like the pennies,” his 9-year-old son Mason said.
Some don’t want the United States to stop making cents
Critics say the rise of electronic commerce and the billions of pennies in circulation mean the U.S. could stop printing the copper coins tomorrow and see little widespread effect for decades. But some people are watching fearfully to see if Trump’s public critique of the penny will affect their business.
Alan Fleming, of Scotland, is the owner of Penny Press Factory, one of a number around the world that manufacture machines that flatten and stamp coins.
“A lovely retired gentleman in Boston sold me over 100,000 uncirculated cents a couple of years ago but he doesn’t have any more,” Fleming wrote. “I will need to purchase new uncirculated cents within the next 12 months to keep my machines supplied and working!”
Regardless of what happens to niche businesses like Fleming’s, penny defenders say they’re an important tool for lubricating the economy even if they’re a money-losing proposition.
Since the invention of money, mankind has wrangled with the question of small change, how to denominate amounts so small that the metal coin itself is actually worth more.
In 2003, Thomas J. Sargent and another economist wrote “The Big Problem of Small Change,” billed as “the first credible and analytically sound explanation” of why governments had a hard time maintaining a steady supply of small change because of the high costs of production.
Why pay money for coins?
In a digital world with the line blurring between the real and the virtual, tactile coins have been reassuring.
“What this all tells you about the United States as a country is that it’s an incredibly conservative country when it comes to money,” said Ute Wartenberg, executive director of the American Numismatic Society.
Pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters are sometimes designed by artists laser-sculpting tiny portraits of leaders and landmarks using special software.
“It’s pretty cool because when I tell people what I do I just say my initials are on the penny,” Joseph Menna, the 14th Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, said in the 2019 film “Heads-Up: Will We Stop Making Cents?”
Fleming is hoping some lobbying may help: “Maybe we should take a trip to Washington and ask to speak to President Trump and Elon Musk and see if we can cut a deal on buying millions of pennies from them.”
February 10, 2025:
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he has directed the Treasury Department to stop minting new pennies, citing the rising cost of producing the one-cent coin.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump wrote in a post Sunday night (Feb. 9, 2025) on his Truth Social site. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
The move by Trump is the latest in what has been a rapid-fire effort by his new administration to enact sweeping change through executive order and proclamation on issues ranging from immigration, to gender and diversity, to the name of the Gulf of Mexico.
Trump had not discussed his desire to eliminate the penny during his campaign. But Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency raised the prospect in a post on X last month highlighting the penny’s cost.
The U.S. Mint reported losing $85.3 million in the 2024 fiscal year that ended in September on the nearly 3.2 billion pennies it produced. Every penny cost nearly $0.037 — up from $0.031 the year before.
The mint also loses money on the nickel, with each of the $0.05 coins costing nearly $0.14 to make.
It is unclear whether Trump has the power to unilaterally eliminate the lowly one-cent coin. Currency specifications — including the size and metal content of coins — are dictated by Congress.
But Robert K. Triest, an economics professor at Northeastern University, has argued that there might be wiggle room.
“The process of discontinuing the penny in the U.S. is a little unclear. It would likely require an act of Congress, but the Secretary of the Treasury might be able to simply stop the minting of new pennies,” he said last month.
Members of Congress have repeatedly introduced legislation taking aim at the zinc coin with copper plating. Proposals over the years have attempted to temporarily suspend the penny’s production, eliminate it from circulation, or require that prices be rounded to the nearest five cents, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Proponents of eliminating the coin have cited cost savings, speedier checkouts at cash registers, and the fact that a number of countries have already eliminated their one-cent coins. Canada, for instance, stopped minting its penny in 2012.
It wouldn’t be the first time the U.S. eliminated its least valuable coin. The half-cent coin was discontinued by Congress in 1857.
Trump’s new administration has been sharply focused on cutting costs, with Musk, who has been brought on to lead the task, targeting entire agencies and large swaths of the federal workforce as he tries to identify a goal of $2 trillion in savings.
“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” Trump wrote in his post.
Trump sent the message as he was departing New Orleans after watching the first half of the Super Bowl.
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