The penny is already dead. Could the nickel be next to go?
The penny is already dead. Could the nickel be next to go?
Daniel de Visé, USA TODAYSun, April 19, 2026 at 9:03 AM UTC
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Last year, the United States Mint pressed the last penny.
Penny preservationists warned that the death of the one-cent coin might seed dire consequences: coin shortages at checkout counters; confusion over how to pay bills not ending in zero or five; and higher prices, as greedy retailers began rounding everything up.
Yet, apart from scattered penny shortages, American society appears to have survived the loss of its least valuable coin.
For every nickel, the government spent 13.78 cents, a loss of nearly 9 cents per coin.
Is the nickel next?
The question is logical: President Donald Trump killed the penny because the government lost money every time it pressed one. Nickels are money-losers, too.
In fact, nickels are bigger losers. The Mint spent 3.69 cents making every penny in 2024. For every nickel, the government spent 13.78 cents, a loss of nearly 9 cents per coin.
Add it up, and the government lost about $18 million minting pennies in 2024. On the nickel, the Mint lost $85 million.
“The argument for getting rid of the nickel is that it costs more to produce – quite a bit more, actually – than its face value,” said David Smith, an economist at Pepperdine University.
Nickels cost more to make because they are larger than pennies and made of costlier stuff: 75% copper and 25% nickel. Pennies look like copper but are – or were – actually made mostly of zinc.
1 / 0'Mourners' hold funeral for the penny at Lincoln Memorial
Men dressed as former US president Abraham Lincoln open a casket for people to toss pennies inside to pay their respects during a "funeral" for the penny at the Lincoln Memorial on December 20, 2025. The US Treasury recently stopped production of the 1 cent piece after a run of 232 years.
Ditching the penny was a 'no-brainer'
Ridding America of the penny “was a no-brainer,” said Robert Whaples, an economist at Wake Forest University who long argued for ditching the coin.
“We’ve got rid of the penny, and I think we should have,” he said, “because the value of the penny was so small, it wasn’t really worth our time to use it.”
America’s growing disdain for the penny was unavoidable, Whaples reasons. Decades ago, a penny could purchase a gumball. Nowadays, the average worker earns about a penny per second. If you spend more than a second with a penny, Whaples said, “you’ve wasted time.”
Pennies ran short long before the Mint stopped pressing them. One big reason: Americans stopped picking them up. Pennies languished between couch cushions and on closet floors, clogging vacuum cleaners and landfills.
Many Americans regard both nickels and pennies as more nuisance than currency. The typical household is sitting on $60 to $90 in neglected coins, enough to fill one or two pint-size beer mugs, according to the Federal Reserve. Americans throw away millions of dollars in coins every year, literally treating them like trash.
Following the death of the American penny, some observers predict the nickel will someday face the same fate.Is the nickel living on borrowed time?
But the U.S. Treasury has no public plan to eliminate the nickel, according to Whaples and other coin experts.
Americans seem to like nickels more than pennies. Consumers are more likely to carry nickels around in their pockets and return them to stores, keeping them in circulation, Whaples said.
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The Treasury pressed only 113 million nickels in 2024 but minted 3.2 billion pennies.
“I don’t see any groundswell for getting rid of the nickel,” Whaples said.
Even so, the nickel’s days may be numbered.
The death of the penny leaves the nickel as the least valuable coin. Inflation erodes the coin’s buying power every year. A stamp hasn’t cost a nickel since 1968. A telephone call on a payphone hasn’t cost a nickel since 1951. (Not that many of us use payphones anymore.)
Is the nickel the new penny?
With the penny gone, coin experts reason, consumers and shop-keepers will lean more heavily on the nickel. The Mint will probably end up making more of them, and the losses will mount.
One big unknown, following the death of the penny, lay in how retailers might handle the math of rounding off cash transactions. Would they round down, saving consumers a few cents, or round up, earning themselves a few cents?
A Common Cents Act, introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in 2025, would round cash transactions to the nearest five cents, a potentially fairer solution. That bill hasn’t progressed, but some states are pursuing “rounding” laws on their own.
If the nickel were nixed, the rounding debate would likely rise anew.
“Let’s say something costs $4.91, and you can only pay $5,” said Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society. “That’s a difference of 9 cents. So, that is a lot of money if you add it up.”
In the coin world, Wartenberg Kagan said, the Darwinian struggle for survival favors more valuable coins. America turned a profit in 2024 on dimes ($36 million) and quarters ($166 million). The Mint could profit handsomely from dollar coins, she said, if only more Americans would use them.
“Through history,” she said, “all governments have had this problem that it’s very cost-effective to make a big piece of money. But what the ordinary people need is small money. That is the conflict.”
Government researchers have spent years studying ways to reduce the cost of making nickels, presumably by using a cheaper mix of ingredients. The goal, of course, would be to bring production costs below five cents per coin.
But some observers foresee the nickel’s ultimate demise, given the steady march of inflation and the gradual erosion of purchasing power in a five-cent coin.
“It’ll still be quite some time before we eliminate the nickel,” said Smith of Pepperdine. How much time? “Ten to 15 years,” he estimates.
“My sense is, at some point it’s inevitable. But not necessarily any time soon.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Could the nickel be discontinued like the penny? Cost outweighs value.
Source: “AOL Money”
