- President Donald Trump says he’s directed the Treasury to kill pennies, which have lost the U.S. Mint money for decades, as every penny costs 3.7 cents to produce. Nickels are even more wasteful, though, costing 13 cents each to produce, and eliminating pennies could push up demand for five-cent pieces.
President Donald Trump on Sunday declared the end of the penny, posting on Truth Social that he had directed the Treasury secretary to stop minting new pennies.
Trump joins a long list of names who have tried to eliminate the penny—a list that includes Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, comedian John Oliver, various members of Congress, and plenty of other developed nations that have successfully killed theirs.
The U.S. has lost money producing pennies for nearly two decades. We’ve stubbornly continued to issue one-cent pieces even as our peer nations have let theirs fall by the wayside: Canada killed off its penny in 2012, while Australia and New Zealand stopped producing pennies in the early 1990s.
The cost of producing a penny has ballooned over the past two decades. For the last 19 years, according to the U.S. Mint, the nation has spent more to mint pennies than it receives back in face value. Currently, each penny costs about 3.69 cents to produce and distribute; last year, the U.S. lost over $85 million issuing over 3 billion pennies, with similar losses in 2023 and 2022. (The mint also lost nearly $18 million on nickels, which, like pennies, cost more to make than they’re worth.)
Still, the proposal ignores the nickel, which is an even more wasteful coin. Each five-cent piece currently costs about 13 cents to make, for a loss of eight cents per nickel.
That’s where the proposal to kill off the penny runs into trouble. While eliminating the one-cent piece appears to be a rare bipartisan issue, with clear majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents expressing a wish to kill off the one-cent coin in a 2022 poll, the nickel has far more fans, with less than one-third of poll respondents expressing a desire to eliminate the five-cent piece.
It’s possible that eliminating the penny would lead to a surge in demand for nickels. That’s the argument of Americans for Common Cents, a pro-penny group funded by zinc manufacturer Artazn, which has a contract with the U.S. Mint to provide the blanks that become pennies.
“[W]ithout the penny, the demand for nickels would rise to fill the gap in small-value transactions,” the group says.
Spokesperson Mark Weller told CNN that nickel production would likely need to rise to 2 million or 2.5 million nickels a year, based on nations that have eliminated their one-cent piece. “In most countries, the lowest denomination coin is the most minted coin,” he told the outlet.
Meanwhile, CNN calculated that producing just 850,000 more nickels this year would wipe out the cost savings from the loss of pennies. (The Department of Government Efficiency did not respond to an inquiry about the administration’s plans for nickels.)
A money-losing proposition
Yes, pennies, despite their coppery surface, have been made of mostly zinc since the early 1980s. At the time, the U.S. made the switch to get around skyrocketing copper prices that led consumers to hoard pennies.
“We didn’t always lose money on pennies,” says Robert Whaples, a professor of economics at Wake Forest University. Inflation “pushed the price of everything up, but not the face value of the penny,” he told Fortune, and as “the cost of making the penny goes up, you’ve got to pay the workers and the people in the zinc mines to mine it.”
Today, high copper prices are once again responsible for the high production costs of coins; paradoxically, high copper prices are what’s pushing up the cost of nickels. The coins are about 75% copper compared with the penny’s 2.5%.
But even if pennies could be pulled out of thin air and cost no resources, Whaples says he would still advocate for eliminating them. The reason: “A penny uses our time.
“With the average wage in the U.S. at $30 an hour, an average American makes a penny every two seconds,” Whaples explains. So, if you’re standing in a checkout line, fumbling a few extra seconds with pennies to make exact change, you’ve just cost yourself—and everyone behind you—money.
Judging by the quantity of pennies filling up Americans’ coin jars and couch cushions, consumers have largely decided that pennies just aren’t worth the time it takes to spend them. Two-thirds of the pennies produced don’t actually circulate, the Congressional Research Service estimates. A New York Times estimate from last year found there are 240 billion pennies spread across the nation’s coin jars, pants pockets, and couch cushions—enough to give each resident over 700 pennies.
In fact, it’s because pennies are so useless that the mint is forced to keep putting them out, Whaples says. “Because people don’t bring the pennies back, the stores start to run out, and they send the message up the chain, ‘Hey, we need more pennies.’ The mint then starts minting more pennies at a cost to the U.S. taxpayer.”
So, even if the mint were to stop making pennies tomorrow, it would take a long time for all those in circulation to disappear, which is just as well, since the U.S. has fallen out of the habit of eliminating currencies. The last time America killed off a coin was before the Civil War. In 1857, Congress directed the U.S. Mint to stop production of the half-cent coin. At that time, according to Data for Progress, the coin was worth what a dime is today.
