Junk silver calculator: what is your silver worth?

What counts as junk silver?

Junk silver is ordinary circulating US coinage from back when circulating US coinage was made of silver. Dimes, quarters and half dollars struck in 1964 or earlier are 90% silver. They are called junk not because they are worthless but because they are common — worn, unremarkable, no date a collector would pay extra for. The name is one of the better jokes in American finance: a coin worth forty-seven times its face value, filed under junk, because the only thing wrong with it is that there are a lot of them.

That is also what makes it useful. Nobody has to appraise a worn 1961 quarter. It is a known quantity of a known metal, priced off a public number, in units small enough to be divisible. People who like the idea of money that cannot be printed tend to like coins that were money when money was like that.

Which US coins are silver, and from which years?

There are four separate answers, and mixing them up is the most common way people get this wrong.

• Dimes, quarters and half dollars dated 1964 or earlier are 90% silver. This is the big one and the one the calculator defaults to.
• Kennedy half dollars dated 1965 to 1970 are 40% silver. Silver left the dime and the quarter in 1965, but the half held on for six more years at a reduced rate, which is the sort of compromise that gets a bill passed.
• Nickels dated 1942 to 1945 with a large mint mark above Monticello's dome are 35% silver. Nickel was a strategic war metal; silver was not. If the mint mark is not above the dome, it is an ordinary nickel.
• Silver dollars dated 1935 or earlier — Morgans and Peace dollars — are 90% silver and heavier per dollar of face than the small change, which is why they sit in their own row above.

Everything dated 1971 or later that you find in change is copper and nickel, with the exception of the 40% silver Eisenhower dollars sold to collectors between 1971 and 1976. A 1965 quarter is not silver. A 1964 quarter is. One year, and the whole difference.

What is a $1,000 face bag of junk silver worth?

The $1,000 face bag is the standard trading unit, and it is a genuinely absurd object. It contains 715 troy ounces of silver, worth about $38,646, and it weighs about 55 pounds — roughly a well-fed spaniel, made entirely of dimes. Half bags of $500 face and quarter bags of $250 face are common for people who would like to be able to lift their savings.

It is worth sitting with that number for a second. A thousand dollars of face value — money that was, within living memory, a thousand dollars — is now a commodity position worth forty-seven times as much. Nothing was done to the coins. They sat in a bag. What changed was the thing they were denominated in, and the change was gradual enough that no single year of it was worth a headline.

Why 0.715 ounces per dollar and not 0.7234?

Because the coins were spent. At mint weight, a dollar of face value in 90% dimes, quarters or halves is exactly 25.0 grams of coin and therefore 0.7234 troy ounces of silver. But these coins spent decades in pockets, tills and vending machines, and metal that leaves a coin does not come back. The trade settled on 0.715 ounces per dollar of face as a flat allowance for that wear, and it is what circulated bags are actually bought and sold against.

The difference is 1.16% — trivial on a jar, about $453 on a $1,000 face bag. This calculator uses the circulated figure by default because circulated is what junk silver is, and offers the mint weight as a checkbox rather than quietly choosing the flattering one. Any calculator that reports only the larger number is selling you something, and it is probably silver.

Is junk silver worth more than its melt value?

Usually, yes, and the gap matters. Melt value is what the metal in the coin is worth. What a coin actually trades for is melt plus a premium, and junk silver has carried a premium for most of the last two decades because small, recognizable, divisible silver is in demand for reasons that have nothing to do with the metal content. That premium moves around a great deal — it has been a few percent in quiet years and well into double digits when everyone wanted silver at once.

So treat every number on this page as the floor of the range rather than a quote. A dealer buying will pay under melt; a dealer selling will charge over it; and the spread between those two is how the dealer eats. If you want to know what you paid over spot on something you already own, that is a different question and it has its own tool: the premium and break-even calculator.

One more thing worth knowing before you dump a jar on a counter. A handful of dates and mint marks in these series are worth considerably more than their silver — key dates in the Mercury dime and Walking Liberty half series especially — and a coin that is worth $300 to a collector is worth $19.32 to a melting pot. It costs nothing to check the dates first. This page values metal; it cannot see rarity, and it will cheerfully tell you that a very scarce coin is worth its weight.

Why there is none of it in your change

In 1965 the Mint stopped putting silver in the money. The coins that already existed did not disappear — they were still legal tender, still worth a dime, still perfectly good for a parking meter. And within a few years they were essentially all gone from circulation.

Nobody organized this. Every individual person who noticed simply kept the silver ones and spent the copper ones, which is the entirely rational thing to do when two coins are legally identical and physically not. Multiply that by a country and the silver leaves the tills in about three years. It has a name — Gresham's law — and the jar in your parents' cupboard is a small monument to it.

Which is the quiet reason this calculator exists. The coins were not saved by people who thought silver would go up. They were saved by people who could feel the difference between two quarters and acted on it, one pocket at a time, sixty years before anyone needed a calculator to tell them they had been right.

Worked examples

• One roll of 90% dimes (50 dimes, $5 face) holds about 3.575 troy ounces of silver, worth about $193.23.
• One roll of 90% quarters (40 quarters, $10 face) holds about 7.15 ounces, worth about $386.46. A roll of 20 halves is the same $10 face and the same silver.
• A pound of worn 90% coins, weighed without the jar, holds about 13.1 troy ounces of silver and is about $18.36 in face value. The silver figure doesn’t depend on wear; the face value estimate does.
• A Morgan or Peace silver dollar holds 0.7735 ounces at full mint weight, about $41.81, or 42 times its face value.
• A 1942 to 1945 war nickel holds 0.0563 ounces, about $3.04, which is 61 times the five cents stamped on it.

Melt values at the stored silver price of $54.05 an ounce, October 24, 2026; the calculator uses the live price when it loads. A dealer will pay somewhat less than melt.

Common questions

What is junk silver?

Junk silver is common-date US circulating coinage that contains silver: dimes, quarters and half dollars dated 1964 or earlier, which are 90% silver, along with 1965 to 1970 Kennedy halves at 40% and 1942 to 1945 war nickels at 35%. It is called junk because the coins carry no collector premium, not because they are worthless. At current prices a pre-1965 dime is worth around 47 times its face value.

How much silver is in a pre-1965 quarter?

A pre-1965 quarter weighs 6.25 grams and is 90% silver, so it contains 5.625 grams of silver, which is 0.1808 troy ounces at mint weight. Circulated coins are traded at a slightly reduced standard of 0.715 troy ounces per dollar of face value, which works out at 0.1788 troy ounces per quarter.

What is a $1,000 face value bag of junk silver worth?

A $1,000 face bag of circulated 90% silver contains 715 troy ounces of silver. At a silver price of $54.05 an ounce — spot on October 24, 2026 — that is about $38,646; the calculator above uses today’s price. The bag weighs roughly 55 pounds, because it is made of about 10,000 dimes or 4,000 quarters.

Are 1965 to 1970 Kennedy half dollars silver?

Yes, but only 40% silver rather than 90%. A 1965 to 1970 Kennedy half weighs 11.5 grams and contains 0.1479 troy ounces of silver, worth about $7.99 today. Kennedy halves dated 1971 and later contain no silver at all, apart from special collector issues.

Are any US nickels made of silver?

Only the wartime nickels of 1942 to 1945, which are 35% silver. You can identify them by the large mint mark placed above Monticello's dome on the reverse, a position used for no other nickel. Each contains 0.0563 troy ounces of silver, about $3.04, which is roughly 61 times face value and the highest multiple of any circulating US silver coin.

Is junk silver worth more than its melt value?

Usually. Melt value is only what the metal is worth. Junk silver typically trades at a premium over melt because small, divisible, easily recognized silver is in demand for its own sake, and that premium has ranged from a few percent to well into double digits. A dealer buying will pay below melt and a dealer selling will charge above it. Treat the figures here as the metal floor rather than a quote.

Should I melt or sell my junk silver?

This page is educational and does not give investment advice. What it can tell you is that a small number of dates and mint marks in these series carry collector values far above their silver content, and that melting destroys that value permanently. Checking dates before selling costs nothing and occasionally matters a great deal.

How much is $1 face value of junk silver worth?

A dollar of face value in pre-1965 dimes, quarters or half dollars holds 0.7234 troy ounces of silver when new. Dealers price worn coins at 0.715 ounces per dollar, an allowance for wear. Multiply by the silver price to get the melt value. The calculator above does it at today's price, and its wear switch flips between the two figures.

Are Morgan and Peace silver dollars junk silver?

They are 90% silver and hold 0.7734 troy ounces each, so they have a melt value like any other 90% coin. They usually sell for more than melt, though, because collectors want them, so dealers price them separately from bags of dimes and quarters. Worn common dates come closest to melt.

What counts as junk silver outside the US?

Every country that once minted silver coins has its own version. In Britain it is pre-1947 silver: coins dated 1920 to 1946 are 50% silver and earlier ones are sterling, 92.5%. Canadian dimes, quarters and half dollars dated 1966 and earlier are 80% silver. Australian coins before 1946 are sterling. Pick your country in the calculator above to count them.

Can I count silver bars, rounds and other countries' bullion coins?

Yes. Under every country the calculator lists generic 1 oz silver rounds, 10 oz, 100 oz and kilo silver bars, gold bars from 1 gram to 1 kilo, and the world's main bullion coins, including fractional gold. They are valued at their stated fine weight, the way dealers price them, so a Maple Leaf counts the same in London as in Toronto.