Junk Silver Calculator by Face Value

$1,000 face bags · 0.715 or 0.723392 oz per dollar

“Junk silver” is pre-1965 US dimes, quarters and half dollars with no collector premium — bought and sold by face value, not by the coin. Enter the face value; this tells you what the silver is worth.

Melt value calculator

US Coin Melt Value & Junk Silver Calculator

How much silver or gold is actually in your coins, and what it is worth today.

Loading today’s metal prices…
Total melt value Metal content at today’s spot
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This is melt value, not collector value. Many of these coins are worth several times — sometimes hundreds of times — the metal in them. Key dates, mint errors and high grades all trade far above melt, and melting destroys that premium permanently. Treat this number as the floor under your coins, never as what they are worth. Have anything unusual looked at before you sell it by weight.

Three traps this calculator will not fall into, and neither should you:

  • 1942 nickels are two different coins. Only the ones with a large P, D or S above Monticello are 35% silver. A small mintmark beside Monticello, or none, means no silver. All 1943–1945 nickels are silver.
  • Circulating Bicentennial coins have no silver. The 1776–1976 quarters, halves and dollars in change are copper-nickel. Only the S-mint collector sets are 40% silver.
  • “Pre-1965 only” is not the whole rule. Modern silver proof sets (1992 onward, and .999 fine from 2019) carry silver in recent dates — they were never released into circulation.

Coin weights and fineness come from the Coinage Act of 1873, the Coinage Act of 1965 (PL 89-81) and 31 U.S.C. § 5112. Figures are an estimate for information only, not an offer to buy or sell and not investment advice.

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Why face value is the unit

Because it is the one thing you can count without a scale. Every 90 % silver dime, quarter and half dollar was struck to the same silver-per-dollar ratio, so $10 face is $10 face whether it is 100 dimes, 40 quarters or 20 halves. That is why the trade quotes junk silver in bags — a “full bag” is $1,000 face — and why a price is usually given as a multiple of face rather than per coin.

The number that decides your answer: 0.715 or 0.723392

This is the whole argument in this corner of the market, and most calculators pick one for you without saying so.

The difference is about 1.2 %. On a handful of coins that is nothing. On a $1,000 face bag it is roughly eight troy ounces of silver, which is real money on both sides of the table. Uncirculated or lightly worn coins justify the mint figure; a mixed bag out of circulation does not. We let you pick, and we tell you which is which.

What counts as junk silver, and what does not

Junk silver means common date, no numismatic premium — worn Roosevelt and Mercury dimes, Washington quarters, Franklin and Walking Liberty halves. It does not include 1965–1970 Kennedy halves, which are 40 % silver and priced on their own basis, nor 1942–1945 wartime nickels at 35 %. And a key date or a coin in genuinely good condition is not junk at all: sold by weight it will fetch a fraction of what it is worth. Sort before you sell.

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The premium over melt

Junk silver rarely trades at melt. It usually carries a premium because it is recognizable, divisible and hard to fake — and that premium widens sharply when demand spikes, then collapses again. The figure here is the metal value: what the silver in the bag is worth. What a dealer bids or asks on top of it is a market of its own.

Not sure whether what you have counts as junk silver at all? What junk silver is lists the coins, their exact silver content from the statutes, and the four that most often end up in the wrong pile.

Counting individual coins instead of face value? Use coin melt value. Sources and price guards: methodology.