Why We Stopped Minting Pennies in 2025
We knew it was coming. We were warned a while back that the US would stop minting new pennies. Well, here we are. On Nov 12, 2025, the final press was completed on the US penny, and production ceased. Why did this happen? What does that mean for those of us who carry change? What does it mean for businesses? Are we the first country to do something like this?
I’m glad you asked! You’re in the right place for the answers. Let’s tackle this subject together.
1) Why did we stop making pennies? The main driver behind this decision was cost. Put simply: it costs us more money to make a penny than the penny is worth. When production stopped, it cost 3.69 cents to make a penny. From a business perspective, if it cost you $20 to make a product, how long would you be selling it for $5? Probably not long at all!
2) What does this mean for businesses? I had some of my business owner customers waste no time asking the bank, “What am I supposed to do?” when we could no longer provide them with boxes of pennies. To put it bluntly, that’s your decision as the business owner, not the bank’s. Businesses can round the retail price to an even number for simplicity. My understanding is that it’s illegal for US businesses to round a transaction up without consent, so their only option is to round down. For example, if your total is $8.87, the business would have to round down to $8.85 instead of going up to $8.90. A couple of transactions like this won’t hurt anybody, but do this a few thousand times and the business will certainly notice a drop in revenue. My assumption is that businesses will move away from the long-held practice of pricing something with a “.99” at the end and just round it up to an even dollar amount. Where I live, sales tax is 10%, so that would be a simple fix. I know it isn’t that high everywhere, so it could adjust by region. Card transactions shouldn’t be impacted at all except for a broad pricing adjustment that impacts everything anyway regardless of payment method. At the end of the day, businesses are able to handle this however they choose, so we’re likely to see all kinds of reactions to this.
3) What does this mean for consumers? I’m willing to bet this won’t impact most people at all, other than the changes already mentioned on this page. If you always use a card already, just keep using it. If you always pay cash for things, just keep paying cash until you run out of pennies, then keep paying cash without the pennies. It won’t look any different. It’s one less type of coin to keep up with.
4) Are we the first country to do something like this? Actually, we’re behind the trend on this one! Here’s a list of just a few of the countries who have already done this:
a) Australia already removed the penny and is taking steps to remove the 5 cent coin as well
b) Canada already removed the penny. Businesses round up or down to the nearest 5 cent increment
c) New Zealand removed the penny a while back. Researchers found that prices went down afterwards, not up(not factoring in inflation or other things that can affect cost)
d) Several European countries have already stopped minting 1 and 2 cent coins and instead opt for rounding cash transactions
5) What’s next? It wouldn’t surprise me if the nickel is next. It currently costs upwards of 3x the value per nickel to produce, much like the penny. However, I haven’t heard or read anything about this being a real thing, so don’t hold your breath. According to MSN, the average household has around 1000 pennies already sitting in the house. So, even if businesses panic because they can’t get pennies from the bank, there are still a huge number of pennies in circulation. If each of us wraps up our pennies and deposits them to the bank, the businesses will be able to go longer before any adjustments that I mentioned earlier. We have enough to use already, but we just sit on them for the most part. One thing that this change does NOT point to is the conspiracy theory that we are weeks away from going completely cashless. No, this has zero impact on that and isn’t related in any way to digital currency. It’s simply due to the cost of production and how inefficient it is, as I stated earlier.