Coin Melt Value of US Silver Coins
Pre-1965 US coinage · weights fixed by statute
Pick the coin, say how many you have, and this tells you what the silver — or copper, or nickel — inside them is worth at today’s price. The weights are not estimates: they are written into US law.
Which US coins actually contain silver
- Dimes, quarters and half dollars dated 1964 and earlier are 90 % silver. From 1965 they are copper-nickel and contain none.
- Kennedy half dollars, 1965–1970, are a special case: 40 % silver, not 90 and not zero. The Coinage Act of 1965 created them and they are the coin most often mispriced by people sorting a jar.
- Silver dollars — Morgan and Peace — are 90 % silver and much heavier than four quarters’ worth.
- Wartime nickels, 1942–1945, are 35 % silver. Ordinary nickels are not silver at all, and the 1942 year is split between the two: only the ones with the large mint mark above the dome are the silver kind. The calculator handles that split rather than pretending the year is uniform.
- Pennies dated 1981 and earlier are 95 % copper — with two exceptions the date alone will not tell you: the 1943 cents are zinc-coated steel, and 1982 was struck both ways, in 95 % copper brass and in copper-plated zinc. A 1982 cent that weighs 3.11 g is the copper one; 2.5 g is the zinc one. This calculator does not price copper, and melting US coinage for its metal is a separate legal question we do not advise on.
Where the weights come from
Not from a dealer’s chart. From the statutes: the Coinage Act of 1873 for the .900 standard and the coin weights in grains, the Coinage Act of 1965 for the 40 % Kennedy half, and 31 U.S.C. §5112 for the modern bullion coins. Grain figures are converted with the exact definition — one grain is 1/480 of a troy ounce — rather than repeating a rounded number from somewhere else.
Wear matters, and we let you say so
A coin that has circulated for fifty years has physically lost metal. That is why the trade prices bulk 90 % silver at about 0.715 troy ounces per dollar of face value rather than the mint specification of 0.723392. For a handful of coins the difference is pennies; across a bag it is real money. If you are working from face value rather than counting coins, the junk silver calculator lets you choose which basis to use instead of choosing it for you.
Melt value is the floor, not the price
Key dates, mint marks, errors and condition can make a coin worth many multiples of its metal — and melting it ends that permanently. Check before you sell a jar of old change by weight. Full disclaimer in the terms; sources and guards in the methodology.
If most of what you are counting is worn pre-1965 dimes, quarters and halves, it is what the trade calls junk silver — that page has the statutory silver content of each coin and the four types that regularly get sorted into the wrong pile.
The calculator can remember your counts in your own browser — see My collection. Loose scrap rather than coins? Use the silver calculator.