Last penny minted in the US sells for millions of dollars at auction
The last U.S. penny ever minted sold at auction for millions of dollars.
This special auction of nearly 700 rare pennies brought in a small fortune of nearly $16.8 million.
The coins, auctioned by Stack’s Bowers Gallery on Thursday, Dec. 11, included the last 2,025 circulating pennies produced by the U.S. Mint, paired in sets of three, each containing a unique 24-karat gold uncirculated penny.
A three-coin set of 232 gold pennies and pennies from the final production run at the Mint’s manufacturing plants in Philadelphia and Denver sold for a total of $16,764,500, the auction house said.
The Treasury Department and the U.S. Mint decided to create the special coin after the Treasury Department complied with President Donald Trump’s order to stop minting pennies, noting that a one-cent coin costs 3.7 cents to produce.
The 232-coin set represents 232 years since the penny’s creation in 1793. Pennies sold at auction are marked with the Ω symbol, the Omega Private Mark, which indicates the end of the penny.
How much did the last coin you earned go for at auction?
The coin sets were auctioned separately in production order, with the first three sets all selling for over $100,000. The final set of coins, which also included the three original dies used to strike the coins, sold for an auction record price of $800,000.
Most of the subsequent early lots had final prices in the $50,000 to $60,000 range. But as the final lots went up for auction, the bidding rose further, with prices for the last 50 pieces ranging from $65,000 to $80,000.
“As these auctions continue, bidders are aware that the available supply is dwindling by the minute,” Brian Kendrella, president of Stack’s Bowers Gallery, said in a news release. “No Omega Penny had ever been sold[at auction]before, so we watched the market develop in real time.”
The bid exceeded the expectations of many coin experts. “We thought it would sell for $40,000 to $45,000 and it sold for $65,000 to $70,000, so it was almost 50 percent more expensive than we expected,” John Feigenbaum, publisher of the rare coin pricing guide Gray Sheet and executive director of the Professional Numismatics Guild (PNG), a nonprofit group made up of many of the nation’s rare coin experts, told USA TODAY.
“It’s so unique and interesting that I would have been shocked if it sold for less than my estimate,” he says. Feigenbaum said the auction house was receiving interest from an unprecedented number of buyers, “people who had never been contacted before.”
On the day of the auction, Stack’s Bowers Gallery had to delay the event by an hour to increase its website’s bandwidth to accommodate the traffic from interested bidders, Kendrela said.
“I’ve never seen so much talk about rare coins and coin collecting,” he says. “Rare coins rarely make headlines, but this auction shows that even a penny can become a superstar.”
Mike Snyder is a national trends news reporter for USA TODAY. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, and X, and email him at: mike snyder & @mikegsnider.bsky.social & @mikesnider & msnider@usatoday.com
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