A debate has existed within the United States government and American society at large over whether the one-cent coin, the penny, should be eliminated as a unit of currency in the United States. The penny costs more to produce than the one cent it is worth, meaning the seigniorage is negative â the government loses money on every penny that is created. Several bills introduced in the U.S. Congress would have withdrawn the penny from circulation, but none have been approved. Such bills would leave the five-cent coin, or nickel, as the lowest-value circulating coin in the United States.
Other countries have also withdrawn coins no longer worth producing, such as Canada withdrawing its penny from circulation in 2013. The most recent time that the United States withdrew its lowest-value coin from circulation was with the half-cent coin (hay-penny) in 1857, at which time the coin was worth approximately cents in dollars.
In 2025, during the second presidency of Donald Trump, the U.S. Treasury halted the production of pennies for general circulation, while continuing to mint pennies for collectors and commemorative purposes. However, the coin remains legal tender and in circulation, as only an act of Congress can eliminate forms of currency.
In 1990, United States Representative Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) introduced the Price Rounding Act of 1989, H.R. 3761, to eliminate the penny in cash transactions, rounding to the nearest nickel. In 2001, Kolbe introduced the Legal Tender Modernization Act of 2001, , and in 2006, he introduced the Currency Overhaul for an Industrious Nation (C.O.I.N.) Act, H.R. 5818. While the bills received much popular support from the public, all failed to become law. Kolbe responded to criticism that the rounding system would increase prices that could hurt the consumer and stated that it "favors neither the consumer nor the retailer because the probability of rounding up or down is 50 percent either way â it would all come out even in the end."
In 2017, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Mike Enzi (R-WY) introduced S. 759, the Currency Optimization, Innovation, and National Savings (C.O.I.N.S.) Act of 2017, that would have stopped minting of the penny for general circulation for 10 years and studied the question of whether production would cease thereafter. The bill died at the end of the 115th Congress with no hearings held by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
On April 30, 2025, Representatives Lisa McClain (R-MI) and Robert Garcia (D-CA) introduced the Common Cents Act, a bill to formalize an end to penny production for general circulation and require cash transactions to be rounded to the nearest nickel.
On February 9, 2025, President Donald Trump said he had ordered the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to stop producing new pennies, a move that he said would help reduce unnecessary government spending. While it is Congress that authorizes the Treasury regarding what coins to mint, the Treasury secretary has the authority to mint coins in amounts they deem necessary. Trump's move has been received with general approval, including Colorado governor Jared Polis, a Democrat who has been pushing to get rid of the penny since before Trump's inauguration. On May 22, 2025, The Treasury announced that the Mint had stopped purchasing penny planchets; production would cease at their exhaustion. After a slowdown in the summer, penny production for general circulation was halted on November 12, 2025, with penny production continuing for collector sets and commemorative purposes.
By mid-November 2025, the Federal Reserve had stopped handling pennies at over half its terminals; this decision was reversed in January 2026. The closures exacerbated regional penny shortages. Businesses affected have adopted differing responses, such as requiring payment in exact change or rounding cash transactions to the nearest five cents. Still, there are no federal regulations on rounding cash transactions, and several cities require exact change to be given. Amid potential confusion among stakeholders, some states have provided recommendations for rounding or have considered legislation.
In 2024, the US mint produced 3,225,200,000 pennies at a cost 3.69 cents per a penny, which resulted in an annual loss to taxpayers of $85.3 million. Further, as the price of the raw materials from which the penny is made exceeds the face value, there is a risk that coins will be illegally melted down for raw materials.
Commissioned by Jarden Zinc, which supplies zinc "penny blanks" to the Mint, a 2012 report conducted by Navigant Consulting found that the government would lose money without the penny. According to the industry's front group Americans for Common Cents' website, "First, the Mint's fabrication and distribution costs include fixed components that will continue to be incurred whether or not the Mint produces the penny. Navigant estimates this fixed component at in FY 2011. Plus, there is in Mint overhead allocated to the penny that would have to be absorbed by the remaining denominations of circulating coins without the penny. Second, under current Mint accounting, the nickel costs eleven cents to manufacture. In a scenario where nickel production doubled without the penny, Navigant concludes that with existing fixed costs, eliminating the penny would likely result in increased net costs to the Mint of , relative to the current state."
In 2024, 57.5% percent of coins minted were pennies. These 3.2 billion pennies at 2.5 g each had a combined weight of 8,000 t (8,888 short tons), and were transported by secure and therefore expensive means from the Mint to banks and then on to stores. Store employees spend valuable time counting low-value pennies at the end of a work shift. Banks often return loose coins on an armored truck to be sorted and wrapped so as to be ready to be given out to a customer. This process costs on the order of 10 cents per roll (a 20 percent charge on a roll of 50 pennies).
With the median wage in the US being per hour in 2024, it takes 1.5 seconds of work to earn one cent. Thus pennies are discarded or avoided as their value is minimal versus the time to count, utilize, and manage.
Pennies are not accepted by most vending machines, or by most toll booths, and are generally not accepted in bulk. Economist Greg Mankiw says that "The purpose of the monetary system is to facilitate exchange, but ... the penny no longer serves that purpose." Pennies often drop out of circulation (for example, they are stored in jars in a person's home) and due to their low value are sometimes even thrown away. This contributes to the United States Mint needing to produce more pennies than all other coins, accounting for 57.5% of all coin production in 2024.
According to a 2025 Federal Reserve study, cash transactions in 2024 dropped to only 14% of transactions. Persons aged 55 and older used cash for 19% of transactions, while those aged 18âÂÂ24 used cash for only 10%.
Research by Whaples in 2007, using data on nearly 200,000 transactions from a multi-state convenience store chain shows, that rounding would have virtually no effect. Consumers would gain a tiny amount about 0.025 â per transaction.
Given that rounding (based on cash transaction totals being rounded up and down to the nearest multiple of five cents) is neutral at the transaction level, and that cash transactions are faster without having to deal with extremely low-value coins, people who disproportionately deal in cash transactions would be helped more by elimination of the penny. To gain consumer favor for reducing the use of the penny it could be legislated (either on a state or federal level) that all cash transactions totals over a nominal amount (say 25 cents) would need to be rounded down to the nearest multiple of five cents. Rounding down cash transaction totals is a win for the merchant too as it encourages cash sales and thereby avoids the electronic payment fee (typically on the order of two percent of the balance).
According to a national survey conducted in January 2017 by the polling team of Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of the Dollar Coin Alliance, there is broad support for eliminating the penny, finding that 77 percent of voters support suspending production of the penny. When told of the savings made by suspending the penny, support jumped to 84 percent. The debate was featured on an episode of The West Wing in 2001, as several news outlets recalled in the context of the debate in 2025.
There has never been a coin in circulation in the U.S. worth as little as the penny was worth in 2025, although other countries have coins with less purchasing power in circulation. Because of inflation, one nickel in 2025 has parity in value to a penny in 1978, and a dime in 2025 has parity in value to a penny in 1967.
Zinc can cause anemia or gastric ulceration in babies that inadvertently ingest pennies made after 1982. A single penny can kill a pet. Also, the mining of zinc and copper causes toxic pollution and is especially undesirable when considering the valuable metals being used to produce a coin with little utility.
A related debate exists for the nickel. As of 2024, nickels cost $0.1378 per coin to produce and distribute, providing an argument for elimination similar to the penny's production at a loss. The 2024 production of nickels was 112,800,000, resulting in an annual loss to taxpayers of $17.7 million. The current face value of a nickel is also well below that which the last remaining lowest-denomination coin (the penny) held at the time of the half-cent's elimination in 1857.
Economist François R. Velde suggested in 2007 that the government make the penny worth five cents. This change would add about $6 billion to the money supply.
Congress passed the Coin Modernization, Oversight, and Continuity Act of 2010, which requires the Treasury to report on possible new metallic coin materials. In the 2014 Biennial Report, Appendix 4, the Mint reported that the previous study had "found that there was no more-cost-effective alternative material for the one-cent", and thus recommended that it continued its current mix of copper and zinc.
Many countries outside the United States have chosen to remove low-value coins from circulation:
However, many nations still use coins of similar or smaller value to the United States cent. In some cases, while the nominal value of the coin may be smaller than that of a US cent, the purchasing power may be higher:
On April 17, 2007, a Department of the Treasury regulation went into effect prohibiting the treatment, melting, or mass export of pennies and nickels. Exceptions were allowed for numismatists, jewelry makers, and normal tourism demands. The reason given was that the price of copper was rising to the point where these coins could be profitably melted for their metal content. In 1969, a similar law regarding silver coinage was repealed. Because their silver content frequently exceeds collector value, silver coins are often sold by multiplying their "face value" times a benchmark price that floats relative to the spot silver price per ounce. According to American law, US citizens are allowed to melt foreign coinage (e.g., Canadian pennies) for personal or commercial use; however, by doing so they are usually violating the laws of the country that issued the coinage in question.