How to price coins at an estate sale

Coins arrive in two forms and the difference matters more than anything else you will learn about them. Either somebody assembled a collection on purpose, in albums, by date and mint mark, or coins simply accumulated in a jar the way coins do. The first is a category that needs a dealer. The second is mostly spendable money with a thin seam of silver running through it, and you can price it yourself in an afternoon.

Get that call wrong in either direction and it costs. Sell an assembled collection by weight and the family loses the part somebody spent thirty years building. Send a coffee can of pennies out for professional evaluation and you have spent a day of the schedule on twelve dollars.

Three piles, three completely different methods

Everything in the house sorts into one of these, and each is priced a different way.

Bullion. Modern coins bought as metal: silver eagles, maple leafs, rounds, bars, gold coin. These are priced off the metal, close to the current market, and they are the easiest thing in the house to value. Per 31 U.S.C. 5112, the American silver bullion coin is specified as .999 fine silver, 31.103 grams, 40.6 millimeters, and the fifty-dollar gold piece as one troy ounce of fine gold. The weight is not in question; only the price is.

Common silver. Circulated United States coin that carries metal value because of when it was struck rather than because anyone collects it. This is the seam in the jar.

Numismatic. Coins whose value comes from scarcity and condition. Albums, graded coins in sealed holders, anything in a flip with a written note on it.

Sort first, price second. Trying to price as you sort is how a scarce date ends up in the melt tray.

The date that does the work

The single most useful fact in this category is a legislative one. United States dimes, quarters and half dollars struck before 1965 were 90 percent silver; the Coinage Act of 1965 replaced them with clad coins of copper-nickel over a copper core, and reduced the half dollar to 40 percent silver, with silver gone from it entirely by 1970 (per Monument Metals’ account of the Act). That single boundary separates a coin with a metal floor from a coin worth exactly what it says on the front.

The statutory weights survive in current law and are worth knowing because they are what you multiply: per 31 U.S.C. 5112, the dime weighs 2.268 grams, the quarter 5.67 grams, and the half dollar 11.34 grams, and the clad versions are three layers, the two outer being 75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel over a copper core.

So the working rule for a jar: pull pre-1965 dimes, quarters and half dollars, pull silver dollars, pull half dollars dated 1965 to 1970, and pull the 1942 to 1945 nickels, which were struck with silver during the war. Everything else in the jar is money.

Melt is arithmetic, but not arithmetic you should memorise

Metal value is fineness times weight times the current price per troy ounce. The first two terms are fixed. The third is not, and this is where printed pricing guides mislead people. The London benchmarks the trade quotes against are set on a schedule: per the LBMA, gold twice each business day at 10:30 and 15:00 London time, and silver once at noon. Between one sale and the next, the number moves.

Monument Metals gives a single dime as containing roughly 0.0723 troy ounces of pure silver. Treat that as an order-of-magnitude anchor rather than a constant to price from, and do what dealers actually do: pull up a current melt-value table on the morning you price, with today’s spot in it, and read the figures off that. We could not reach a first-party United States Mint source for the per-denomination silver weights while writing this, and rather than print numbers we had not verified, the honest advice is that this is a lookup, not a memorisation.

Two habits keep you out of trouble. Sort by denomination before weighing, because the metal content differs per coin. And when you take an offer on a silver lot, ask what percentage of melt it represents and against which day’s price, because a buyer quoting yesterday’s spot at ninety percent and one quoting today’s at eighty-five are not offering what the raw numbers suggest.

Grade is the whole game on collector coins, and you cannot fake it

Collector value runs on a single scale. Per CoinWeek, the Sheldon scale is a 70-point system running from Poor (P-1) to Mint State (MS-70), with grades 1 through 58 describing circulated coins and 60 through 70 reserved for uncirculated ones. Dr William H. Sheldon set it out in Penny Whimsy in 1949 for 1794 large cents; the American Numismatic Association adopted it in 1977, and PCGS in 1986 and NGC in 1987 institutionalised it, with more than 100 million coins graded since.

Two things follow for an operator. First, the difference between adjacent grades on a scarce coin can be a large multiple of price, and reading that difference is a trained skill that takes years. You are not going to acquire it between now and Friday. Second, a coin already in a sealed grading holder has had that work done for it, and its grade is printed on the label. Those are the coins you can look up honestly.

The trap sits right here: never clean a coin. CoinWeek notes that graders account for evidence of cleaning when assigning a grade. A polish that makes a coin look brighter on the table can move it out of a normal grade entirely, and that damage does not come back. Dust it if you must handle it. Nothing more.

The traps that cost real money

• Cleaning. Said twice on purpose. It is the only step in this whole page that is irreversible.
• Breaking up an assembled album. A folder filled in by date and mint mark took somebody years. It usually sells as a set for more than the sum of its holes.
• Selling a graded coin by weight. If it is in a plastic slab with a serial number, it has already been assessed by somebody whose whole job is assessment.
• Handling proof and uncirculated surfaces. Fingerprints on a mirror finish are permanent. Edges only.
• Assuming “old” means “valuable”. A worn wheat cent from a common year is worth a few cents. Age alone does not create scarcity.

Who to call, and when

The American Numismatic Association’s position is that “an educated numismatic community is the best defense against fraud”, and it publishes fraud alerts and offers mediation for disputes between parties. That is the right posture for an operator too: you are not trying to become a numismatist, you are trying to know enough to recognize the moment you should stop.

Stop and call a dealer when you find gold coin of any kind, a sealed graded holder, an album that was clearly filled deliberately, or a quantity you cannot get through before the doors open. Take two opinions where the money looks meaningful, exactly as the pricing chapter of our free playbook recommends for every specialist category, and build a relationship with one honest coin dealer early, because you will need them again. The chapter on certifications and associations covers where those relationships tend to come from.

Nothing here is an appraisal. What it is, is a way to make sure that the silver leaves at silver prices, that the collection leaves as a collection, and that the jar of change leaves as a jar of change.