War Nickels: Which Nickels Are Silver, What They're Worth, and the Rare Ones

War nickels are the US nickels dated 1942 to 1945 that carry a large P, D or S above the dome of Monticello on the back. They are 35% silver, 56% copper and 9% manganese, and each holds 0.05626 troy ounces of silver: about $3.04 of metal at the $54.05 silver price of October 24, 2026, roughly 61 times the face value. A 1942 nickel with no letter above the dome is ordinary nickel and worth five cents. Nickels from 1946 on are ordinary nickel too.

In 1942 the Mint needed nickel for armor, so it made the five-cent coin partly out of silver, which is a bit like running out of paper towels and drying your hands with dollar bills. Some of those coins are still sitting in coffee cans, and from the front they look like every other nickel.

What years are war nickels?

Eleven of them, counting each year and mint. Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco struck about 870 million war nickels between October 1942 and the end of 1945, and almost a third of all of them are one coin: the 1943-P.

Mintages from the United States nickel mintage figures compiled on Wikipedia from Mint records. Not silver, though dated 1942: the 1942 with no mint mark (49,818,600 made) and the 1942-D (13,938,000), both struck in the old copper-nickel before the switch in October.

The year 1942 is the trap. The Mint spent most of it making ordinary nickels, then switched alloys in October, so the same date comes in two metals. The mint mark settles it: a big letter above the dome means silver, and no big letter means you are holding a nickel that is exactly what it says it is, which in this hobby counts as a disappointment.

How to spot a silver nickel in a roll

Turn the coin over. On the back of every Jefferson nickel is Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s house, and on a war nickel there is a large P, D or S sitting right on top of its dome, like a weathervane. On every other nickel from that era the mint mark is small and off to the right of the building, or missing altogether.

The Mint did this on purpose. It wanted the coins easy to sort out and pull from circulation after the war, so it gave them a mint mark several times the usual size, and for the first time put a P on coins from Philadelphia. Philadelphia had never signed its work before. It took a world war to get it to put its initial on something.

What won’t help: a scale. War nickels weigh 5 grams, exactly like the nickels in your car’s cup holder, which is the point of the whole design (more on that below). Color helps a little. A worn war nickel tends to tone a duller gray than its neighbors, but plenty of ordinary old nickels are dull and gray too, so trust the letter, not the shade.

So sorting a $2 roll goes like this: break it open on a towel, flip all forty coins face down, and look for the dates 1942 to 1945 with a big letter above the building. It takes about as long as a commercial break, and the odds have gotten long. Most war nickels left circulation in the mid-1960s, once their silver was worth more than five cents, so a modern roll rarely holds one.

How much is a war nickel worth?

As metal, about $3.04 at the $54.05 silver price of October 24, 2026. A war nickel holds 1.75 grams of pure silver, or 0.05626 troy ounces; it takes about 17.8 of them to make one ounce. The coin melt value chart runs the same arithmetic at today’s price.

That makes the war nickel the best deal in old pocket change, measured the way dealers sell junk silver, by face value. Twenty war nickels make $1 of face and hold 1.125 ounces of silver. Ten pre-1965 dimes, also $1 of face, hold 0.7234. Dollar for dollar, the nickels carry about 56% more silver, which is why the silver in a war nickel is worth about 61 times its face while a silver dime or quarter runs about 39 times.

For most coins in most conditions, melt value is roughly what they sell for. CoinWeek notes that circulated rolls trade at about their silver value. Dealers buy them below that and sell them a little above it; the gap is the dealer’s premium, explained in why gold and silver cost more than spot. Coins that look new, and the varieties in the next sections, are worth more to collectors.

Why did the Mint put silver in a nickel?

Because the war needed the nickel, the metal. Nickel went into armor and hardened steel, and on March 27, 1942, Congress let the Mint take it out of the five-cent coin. The law suggested half silver, half copper. That plan hit a problem no general had considered: vending machines. A 1942 vending machine checked a coin’s weight and its pull on a magnet to tell a nickel from a slug, and a silver-copper coin would have been spat back out of every candy and cigarette machine in America.

So the Mint tried nickel-free mixes until one passed the machines, and landed on 56% copper, 35% silver and 9% manganese. To a soda machine it looked exactly like a nickel, and it kept passing for four years.

Here is the number that makes the whole program funny. By one estimate, by the chemist Mark Benvenuto in The Numismatist in 2000, switching the nickel saved as much as 827,163 pounds of nickel over the entire war. In the same years, about 300 million pounds of nickel were being produced every year. Divide that by 365 and you get about 822,000 pounds a day. Four years of silver nickels saved roughly one day’s worth of nickel. It was the national equivalent of skipping dessert to pay off the mortgage. CoinWeek, reporting Benvenuto’s view, suggests the real goal was morale: every time you bought a soda, you were doing your bit.

The coin that was worth half its face

When a 1943 war nickel was made, the silver inside it was worth about 2.5 cents. Silver averaged 45 cents an ounce that year, according to the US Geological Survey. So the Mint was putting two and a half cents of metal into a five-cent coin, which is how coins are supposed to work: the metal is worth less than the number on the front.

The silver didn’t stay cheap. A war nickel’s silver is worth more than five cents whenever silver is above about 89 cents an ounce. Silver averaged $1.09 in 1962, and it has been above 89 cents ever since. A dime’s silver needs silver above $1.38 to beat its face, which didn’t happen until 1967. So war nickels became worth more melted than spent about five years before the dimes and quarters did. They started disappearing from change first.

The same silver that cost the Mint 2.5 cents in 1943 is worth about $3.04 now, roughly 120 times more. Over the same stretch, consumer prices rose about nineteen-fold, so the five cents printed on the coin buys what about a quarter of a cent bought in 1943. The nickel kept its face. The silver kept its value. Only one of them was designed to.

Into the weeds: how much silver is still out there?

All 869,923,700 war nickels together held about 48.9 million troy ounces of silver, about 1,522 metric tons, worth about $2.65 billion at the October 24, 2026 price. Their total face value was about $43.5 million. Nobody knows how many survive. Some were melted; the rest sit in jars, rolls and dealer bags.

Which war nickels are rare?

None of the eleven regular dates is rare in the way collectors use the word; even the scarcest, the 1943-D, had more than 15 million made. The money is in mistakes and in condition:

• The 1943/2-P overdate. The Mint reused a 1942 die and punched a 3 over the 2, so a faint 2 shows under the 3 in the date. CoinWeek puts the number made at roughly 100,000 to 200,000, with only a couple of hundred known in mint condition.
• The 1943-P “doubled eye.” A doubled die left Jefferson with a second eye.
• The 1945-P doubled die reverse, with doubling on the lettering on the back.
• Full steps. Monticello has six steps under its columns. A coin struck so sharply that all six show clearly is scarce and sells for a large multiple of an ordinary one.
• Wrong metal. A few 1943 nickels were struck on leftover copper-nickel blanks, and a few 1942-P and 1946 nickels exist in the other alloy. These are errors, sorted by testing, not by eye.

Values for these change with grade and the market, so check a grading service’s price guide, such as PCGS CoinFacts for the 1943/2-P, before selling one. A coin that might be worth real money should be graded before it is sold, not cleaned; cleaning cuts collector value (see how to clean silver coins).

The 1944 nickel with no mint mark is fake, and it’s worth more than the real ones

Every genuine 1944 nickel was a war nickel, and every war nickel has a big letter above the dome. So a 1944 nickel with no mint mark cannot be real. It is the work of Francis LeRoy Henning of Erial, New Jersey, who in the early 1950s ran a coin press in a rented building with a sign out front saying “Child’s Plastic Moulded Products Company.”

Henning made nickels dated 1939, 1944, 1946, 1947 and 1953, mostly 1944, from about $6,800 of Monel, a copper-nickel alloy, bought in 1954. He forgot, or never knew, that a 1944 nickel needed the big letter. A New Jersey collector spotted one in October 1954, a bank teller in Pennsauken reported $2.40 of suspect nickels from him a few months later, and his habit of depositing piles of coins all bearing the same date didn’t help. When the Secret Service closed in, he threw about $20,000 face value of fakes, roughly 400,000 coins, into Cooper Creek in New Jersey and the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania.

He lost money. CoinWeek works out that he took in about $5,000, spent more than that on metal alone, and finished nearly $7,000 down, before the three years in prison and the $5,000 fine. He may be the only counterfeiter on record to lose money making nickels, which is like robbing a bank and leaving a tip.

The twist is that collectors now want them. Common Henning 1944s have sold for $30 to $50 and recently for $100 or more, according to CoinWeek, which is roughly 10 to 30 times the silver in a real war nickel. Henning’s nickels finally turned a profit, about seventy years too late for Henning. Many weigh about 5.40 grams instead of 5, and some show a low spot in the left leg of the R in “Pluribus.”

Is it legal to melt war nickels?

Yes. Since December 14, 2006, US Mint rules have banned melting or exporting pennies and nickels. The same rules carve out one exception by name: the ban “shall not apply to 5-cent coins inscribed with the years 1942, 1943, 1944, or 1945” (31 CFR 82.2(d)). The full rules, and what they mean for silver dimes and quarters, are in is it legal to melt coins?

Legal, though, is not the same as worth the trouble. A refiner will take a cut, and a bag of war nickels is mostly copper and manganese, so most owners sell them as coins instead.

A fair objection: aren’t war nickels a hassle?

The honest case against them is that they are fiddly. It takes about 18 coins to make an ounce of silver, against one coin for a Silver Eagle, and every one of them has to be counted. If the aim is ounces, an ounce is an ounce, and a bar or a round holds it in one piece.

What the war nickel offers instead is the same thing junk silver always offers: small, familiar, recognizable pieces, each with a date and a letter anyone can check, made by a mint that is long past changing its mind. Nobody can print another 1943 nickel. The comparison of every kind of junk silver, by face value and by the ounce, is in what is junk silver?, and the junk silver calculator adds up a mixed jar.

Outside the US: what Canada did instead

Canada needed its nickel for the war too, and went the other way. In 1942 and 1943 it made its five-cent coin from tombac, a brass-like 88% copper and 12% zinc; in 1944 and 1945, from chrome-plated steel. None of it was silver. Some of the wartime coins carried a message in Morse code around the rim: “We Win When We Work Willingly.” Canada’s last silver five-cent coin is dated 1921, so there is no Canadian war nickel to hunt for in change, only a coded pep talk.

Readers in the UK, Australia and elsewhere can find which of their old coins are silver, and until when, in when did coins stop being silver?

The short answer, again

Flip the nickel. If it says 1942, 1943, 1944 or 1945 with a big letter on top of the dome, it holds 1.75 grams of silver, about 60 times face. It is the one in the coffee can worth sixty of its neighbors. If the big letter isn’t there, it’s a nickel, and it’s worth exactly what it says.

Sources

• Alloy, the March 27, 1942 law, the large mint mark and its purpose, the first P on a US coin, the 1943/2-P overdate and the Henning 1944s: Jefferson nickel, Wikipedia.
• Mintages by date and mint, 1942 to 1945: United States nickel mintage figures, Wikipedia.
• Vending machines and manganese, the nickel saved (Mark Benvenuto, The Numismatist, 2000), withdrawal in the mid-1960s, varieties and full steps, and circulated rolls trading near silver value: Silver War Nickels: History, Values and Varieties, CoinWeek.
• Francis LeRoy Henning, his dies, his losses, his sentence and what his nickels sell for: A Collectible Counterfeit: The Story of Henning Nickels, CoinWeek.
• The melting ban and its war nickel exception: 31 CFR 82.2.
• Silver prices in 1943 (45 cents) and 1962 ($1.09): US Geological Survey, Data Series 140, silver unit value, as stored in this site’s data file. Silver on October 24, 2026: gold-api.com.
• Consumer prices, 1943 and 2026: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis CPI table.
• Canada’s wartime five-cent coins: Nickel (Canadian coin), Wikipedia.

Worked out here, for checking: 5 g × 35% = 1.75 g = 0.05626 oz; × $54.05 = $3.04 (60.8× face); 20 coins = 1.125 oz per $1 face, against 0.7234 for 90% coins (1.56×); break-even silver $0.05 ÷ 0.05626 = $0.889; 1943 silver inside 0.05626 × $0.45 = 2.5¢; 300 million lb ÷ 365 = 822,000 lb a day against 827,163 lb saved; all 869,923,700 coins hold 48.9 million oz, 1,522 t, $2.65 billion; CPI 334.4 ÷ 17.3 = 19.3.

Questions people actually ask

What years are war nickels?

War nickels are the US nickels dated 1942 to 1945 with a large P, D or S above the dome of Monticello on the back: 1942-P, 1942-S, and every 1943, 1944 and 1945 nickel from Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco. A 1942 nickel with no letter above the dome, or with a small D beside the building, is ordinary copper-nickel.

Are war nickels real silver?

Yes. War nickels are 35% silver, 56% copper and 9% manganese. Each weighs 5 grams and holds 1.75 grams of pure silver, or 0.05626 troy ounces.

How much is a war nickel worth?

As metal, about $3.04 at the $54.05 silver price of October 24, 2026, roughly 61 times its face value. Circulated war nickels usually sell for about their silver value; uncirculated coins, full-steps coins and varieties such as the 1943/2-P overdate are worth more to collectors.

How much is a roll of war nickels worth?

A roll of 40 war nickels, $2 in face value, holds about 2.25 troy ounces of silver: about $121.64 at the October 24, 2026 silver price of $54.05.

How can you tell if a nickel is silver?

Check the date and the back. Silver nickels are dated 1942 to 1945 and have a large P, D or S above the dome of Monticello. Weighing won't help, because war nickels weigh 5 grams, the same as ordinary nickels.

Is a 1944 nickel with no mint mark worth anything?

It is a counterfeit, because every genuine 1944 nickel carries a large mint mark. Most were made by Francis LeRoy Henning in New Jersey in the 1950s. Collectors now buy Henning nickels; common ones have sold for $30 to $50 and recently for $100 or more, according to CoinWeek.

What is the rarest war nickel?

Of the regular coins, the 1943-D had the smallest mintage, about 15.3 million. The scarcest well-known variety is the 1943/2-P overdate, with roughly 100,000 to 200,000 made. Coins with all six steps of Monticello sharply struck are also scarce.

Is it legal to melt war nickels?

Yes. The US rules that ban melting pennies and nickels, in force since December 14, 2006, do not apply to 5-cent coins dated 1942, 1943, 1944 or 1945 (31 CFR 82.2(d)).

Why were war nickels made with silver?

Nickel was needed for the war. On March 27, 1942, Congress let the Mint remove it from the five-cent coin. The mix of 56% copper, 35% silver and 9% manganese was chosen because coins made with it still passed vending machine checks.