The U.S. Mint stopped making pennies in 2025, but legislation passed by the Senate and headed to President Donald Trump’s desk will formally end their production after 234 years.
The bill, passed by voice vote late Monday, directs the government to not make pennies, giving a legal stamp of approval to the Trump administration’s decision to stop producing the currency last year. The penny, among the first coins to be made after the Mint was established in 1792, has become increasingly expensive to produce and is used by fewer and fewer consumers as digital transactions have become more standard.
Trump is expected to sign the bill. He wrote in a social media post last year that the U.S. has produced the 1-cent coin for “far too long.”
Ending the penny will save millions of dollars
The Mint says that production of a penny now costs almost 4 cents and that ceasing to make them would generate immediate savings of $56 million annually.
The bipartisan bill, called The Common Cents Act, was sponsored by Reps. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., and Robert Garcia, D-Calif.
“When it comes to taking on waste and making sure our tax dollars are spent wisely, it’s common sense that we should stop making a coin that costs nearly four times more than it’s worth to produce,” Garcia said.
Consumers can still use their pennies
Pennies are still in circulation, and the formal end to their production doesn’t mean consumers or stores can’t use them. The Mint said it made 3.2 billion pennies in 2024.
The bill outlines new procedures for stores as pennies are phased out, and it allows them to round transactions up or down to the nearest 5 cents.
So… instead of addressing any of the 13,726,512 things that are more important than this, Congress wasted a bunch of time to pass a bill to do the thing that Trump already signed an EO for… and had already been carried out… last year.
And the bill is extra useless, because it’s one within the tiny handful of Trump EOs that aren’t going to be torn to shreds by future presidents. 🤷♂️
because discontinuing the penny required congressional approval, and the legislation was needed to direct retailers and other handlers of coin on how they must round transactions: right now, you don’t fucking know what they’re doing.
most still use the penny,
some round properly,
some round all transaction amounts down. walmart self checkout does this by rounding up the change disbursed. change due: 31c? you get 35c back, and it’s noted on the receipt as ‘rounding’. midwest chain kwik trip also rounds this way,
but some choose to take every fucking cent they can and round all transaction amounts up. taco johns, dollar general both were doing this. dg not even noting it on the receipt and going so far as to claim ‘we don’t have any pennies’ (every single time?!?! well that’s not the customer’s fault, give 'em a nickel back then).
well that’s not the customer’s fault, give 'em a nickel back then
Receipt said 10.46 and you billed me $10.50? Sounds like theft to me.
Because they need the precious metals in nickels for AI too…
The bill would also allow the government to use an inner layer of zinc when producing the nickel, which could increase in circulation as the penny is phased out. The 5-cent coin is currently made from both nickel and copper, which is more expensive than zinc.
Wild take, we can stop producing nickles and dimes too. Round every purchase down to the last quarter.
Wilder take, get rid of “cents” entirely and reset the currency to use whole numbers.
When the penny was first minted, its value in today’s dollars was well over 25 cents, so that’s a reasonable take for sure.
Let’s just round to the nearest dollar. What can you buy for less than a dollar now anyways?
Tons of produce and canned goods in my area.
An apple
Bought two shrimp from the grocery store the other day for 59¢
Probably like 30 seconds worth of AI tokens
No thanks.
Round of pool for 3 quarters
Keep the dime. Get rid of the quarter and nickel
No need to break it into 5 cents
Could have kept the penny for two coins
Penny, dime, dollar, (5dollars) 10 dollars
.01, .1, 1, 10
Good 👍 do daylight savings time already
What are old people gonna give out on Halloween now? Nickels? Inflation is ruining everything!
Fun fact, when we eliminated the half-penny, it was worth more than 10¢ today.
Stores around here have already been putting up “penny shortage” signs so they have an excuse to charge extra. A penny isn’t much, but they know that it adds up quickly.
Fred Myer (my workplace) just rounds up in your favor. IE if you buy something that’s $0.99 you’ll get back 0.05. Most people don’t even use cash, and those that do a maximum of 4¢ “loss” per transaction is irrelevant
which, i think, is the way that they had to do it if they were going to round at all… because there was no legislation saying that a merchant could legally give less change back than what was due for the transaction.
They probably loose similar amounts to credit card proceasing fees anyways.
More than that, I’m sure. Even if a retail establishment is absolutely massive, they’re still probably eating 9 or 10 cents per transaction just on the swipe fee. My company (day job, not the other one) does an absurd amount of credit card business by the metric of comparison to my own feeble bank account, but our transaction fee is still around 15 cents, I think, plus about 1.5%.
Swipe fees are the main reason why your local bodega has a credit card minimum of $8 or whatever. That, plus the fact that most processors will charge the merchant the swipe fee even for transactions that were declined. If all you buy is a pack of gum and charge it, they could literally come out negative on the sale by a few cents.
For my dinkum personal operation, Visa/MasterCard/etc. charge me 20 cents per transaction and just to be extra special Amex charges 25 cents. Either of the above plus 3.75%, and my gateway charges another 10 cents on top of that because fuck me for being a small time businessperson, I guess.
Yup. Recently had a plumber guy over who only took cash or checks cause the processing fees were 5% or something around there
Good times, glad my local store is being nicer
Places started doing that the day the EO was signed lol. By far the most common way places handle it is just rounding to the nearest 5¢. If the total is $x.x1 or $x.x2 it gets rounded down. If it’s $x.x3 or $x.x4 it’s rounded up.
it adds up quickly.
Not really, no.
Kill the nickel and dime, too.
Or don’t. I haven’t used money in so many years that the other day I had some change and it felt so small in my hand because I haven’t held any in so long. So makes no difference to me. But when they killed the half-penny, it was worth almost a quarter is today, if I recall correctly.
Yeah, that’ll take care of that $40 TRILLION debt.
Long as there’s demand for bonds, they won’t really ever pay off the debt. Matter of fact, having debt is like the default for governments because it’s cheap money if used wisely (so not whatever the US is doing). Right now the average interest rate on their debt is still lower than at the start of the century. Trump needs to keep hurting the country to make it high enough to matter, but he’s got over 2 years to do it so I’ve got full confidence in him.
