Image of a penny and pennies being made in a factory

The U.S. Mint prepares penny blanks for stamping in Philadelphia, 2007. Illustration by Eddie Guy; David Zalubowski/AP Images (U.S. Mint)

Cents or Nonsense?

Pennies cost more to mint than they’re worth. Can we give them up?

March 31, 2025

By Brian S. McGrath

Can you remember the last time you received a penny? If you’re like most Americans, you tossed it into a “penny jar” or piggy bank, or it fell unnoticed beneath the cushions of your sofa. In other words, you barely gave it a thought.

That may be because pennies aren’t worth the copper-coated zinc they’re made of. Each 1-cent coin costs the United States Mint more than 3 cents to produce, and the result is a coin that most people don’t spend. In fact, Americans have stashed away an estimated 250 billion pennies—about 700 per person—taking them out of circulation, according to the U.S. Mint.

Ironically, this hoarding of nearly worthless pennies creates a demand for even more of them. Last year, the Mint’s facilities in Denver and Philadelphia produced more than 3 billion replacement pennies so there’d be enough for every cash transaction in the U.S. that required them.

“At the policy level,” says Philip Diehl, director of the Mint from 1994 to 2000, “I think everybody agrees this is ridiculous.”

‘At the policy level, I think everyone agrees this is ridiculous.’

That’s the crux of America’s penny problem. For decades, Mint directors, politicians, and others have appealed to Congress—which authorizes the manufacture of the nation’s currency—to retire the coin, but to no avail. Lawmakers haven’t thought the penny was worth the time it would take to get rid of it. The $119 million the government spent making pennies in 2024 pales in comparison to the trillions it spends each year to keep itself running.

But calls for the coin’s elimination keep coming. Last month, President Trump ordered the U.S. Treasury to stop minting new pennies, calling it unnecessary government spending. But it’s unclear whether he has the power to do this.

“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nation’s budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he said in a social media post.

Time Is Money

The federal government began minting pennies with the establishment of the U.S. Mint, in 1792. Long-running government programs can be hard to change, especially when multiple agencies share responsibility. In the case of the penny, that’s Congress, the U.S. Mint, and the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, which orders coins from the Mint.

Other countries, including New Zealand and Australia, got rid of their pennies. In Canada, which stopped making them in 2012, cash transactions get rounded to the nearest nickel, so customers pay, for instance, $3.80 for something calculated to cost $3.79.

Proponents of the penny say rounding up amounts to imposing an extra sales tax on some products, and Americans would never go for such a system.

Others disagree. Robert Whaples, an economist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, studied tens of thousands of convenience-store transactions and found that rounded totals worked in the customer’s favor about as often as they didn’t. Given the tax on their time, he says, people would rather forgo the nuisance of counting change.

“The average American earns about a penny every two seconds,” he says. “If it takes you two seconds to use the penny, its value is wiped out.”

Making Money: Circulating Coins

The process of producing our change, from steel rods to bagging.

Sentimental Value?

There are other arguments for keeping the penny. The pro-penny lobby Americans for Common Cents lists some of them on its website: People donate their pennies to charities. People with lower incomes or without bank accounts rely on pennies. Two-thirds of Americans want to keep the coin in circulation, according to an Americans for Common Sense poll.

But experts say even those reasons have begun to fade. Most people with low incomes make cashless transactions on apps like Cash App, says Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a sociologist at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And Walmart, which employs more people than any other company in the U.S., pays employees who don’t provide banking information with cash cards. There’s no evidence, many experts say, that a significant number of Americans depend on cash.

Some argue that people with lower incomes need every penny they can get.

Yet however worthless it may be, getting rid of the iconic coin may seem to many people a huge loss.

“So much of who we are as Americans is presented on our currency,” says Andrew Keinsley, an economist at Weber State University, in Utah, who’s on the side of retiring the penny.

“On each coin and each bill there are pictures of presidents and other important figures in our history,” Keinsley says. “Removing currencies from circulation almost feels like a gesture of disrespect toward those who got us where we are today.”