The Treasury Department is winding down the production of pennies, after ordering a last batch of the blanks used to print the coins this month.
The end of penny production, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, comes a few months after President Trump ordered the Treasury Department to stop producing them as a cost-saving measure, pointing out that pennies have long been more expensive to manufacture than they are worth.
Pennies, which are made up of 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper plating, cost about 3.69 cents to make, according to Treasury Department statistics, which show the price of production skyrocketed over the last decade. Ten years ago, it cost 1.3 cents to manufacture each penny. In the 2024 fiscal year alone, the cost of production rose by over 20 percent.
The U.S. Mint will keep manufacturing pennies until its supply of blanks runs out, a Treasury spokeswoman said Thursday. The Mint has estimated that ceasing production of the penny will save the taxpayers an annual $56 million in reduced material costs.
The Treasury forecasts that there will be additional savings once the facilities used to produce pennies are converted for other purposes.
The penny had been falling out of favor for years, and as it became less popular, the Mint scaled down its production. Penny production has fallen fairly steadily in the past decade, from over 9.36 billion coins made in 2015 to just over 3.22 billion last year.
There are still about 114 billion pennies in circulation, according to the Treasury. But eventually, once production ceases, there will not be enough of them in circulation to facilitate day-to-day transactions, meaning businesses that deal in cash may have to round prices to the nearest nickel.
While the Treasury hasn’t indicated that nickels are going anywhere, they aren’t exactly cheap to produce, either.
The nickel, worth 5 cents, cost about 13.78 cents to produce in the 2024 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Mint’s annual report, a jump of 19.4 percent from the year before. The cost of making both nickels and pennies has outpaced the coins’ street value for 19 years running, the report said.
Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter for The Times, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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