1943 steel penny value, and the 1943 copper penny

A 1943 cent that sticks to a magnet is steel, the ordinary one, and NGC's price guide puts a worn Philadelphia example at $0.05 and one that never circulated at $3.25, rows last updated on 12 July 2020. Nearly all of them are steel: 1,093,838,670 were struck across the three mints that year. The 1943 penny that sells for six figures is copper-colored and does not stick.

Copper was going to the war effort. In the Mint's own words, "in 1943, pennies were made of zinc-coated steel because copper was needed during World War II". The new cent weighed 2.70 grams against the 3.11 of the one before it. In shops it was a nuisance: NGC records that steel cents were "mistaken for dimes when new and sometimes nickels when worn". Being magnetic, they also "failed to work in vending machines and turnstiles". It is the only year the Mint struck steel coins for circulation, and it made no proofs at all in 1943, the specially struck coins sold to collectors (PCGS). In 1944 it went back to a copper alloy, a brass with no tin in it, part of it recovered from spent shell casings, and the 1944 cent has its own page.

What a steel cent is worth

Grades below come from the scale US dealers price by, which the grading article lays out. G-4 is a coin worn until the design is flat; VF and AU are light wear and almost none. MS means mint state, never circulated, and the number says how good the surface is. BN on a label is brown, the colour copper turns with age.

NGC price guide: the Philadelphia and Denver rows dated 12 July 2020, the San Francisco rows 27 August 2020. Those are retail guide figures. What a buyer offers for your coin is a different number.

The right-hand column is the odd part of this coin. Steel blanks wore the dies out, the stamps that press the design into the metal, so the Mint changed them more often and struck harder, and more 1943 cents survive in MS-68 than any other wheat cent (PCGS). Philadelphia is the scarce one up there, at about 75 pieces, and PCGS puts Denver at possibly fewer than 200 in MS-68. A 1943-D graded MS-68+ sold for $14,400 through Heritage in January 2025. None of that is what is in the jar: PCGS estimates 68 million Philadelphia survivors in all grades.

The mint mark sits under the date, and no letter means Philadelphia. Pennies with no mint mark covers the rest of the dates people ask about.

The one that is copper

When production switched, bronze blanks left over from 1942 stayed behind in the presses and got struck with 1943 dies. The Mint's own explanation: "coin experts speculate that they were struck by accident when copper-alloy 1-cent blanks remained in the press hopper when production began on the new steel pennies."

How many exist depends on who is counting. The Mint said in 1999 that "approximately 40 1943 copper-alloy cents are known to remain in existence". The census collectors keep is smaller: 17 Philadelphia, 7 San Francisco and 1 Denver, compiled by Saul Teichman and reported by CoinWeek in February 2026. NGC confirms about 17 for Philadelphia and adds that most of them are worn or impaired in some way.

Two private sales beat every public one: the unique 1943-D at $1.7 million through Legend Numismatics in September 2010, and the 1943-S that was then the finest known, at $1 million in September 2012. Worn examples are not cheap either. A Philadelphia bronze graded AU50 made $336,000 at Heritage on 14 July 2022, and CoinWeek's 2025 census puts circulated ones at auction "between $240,000 and $336,000".

Some of them really did circulate. Don Lutes Jr., 16 years old, found one in his change in a cafeteria in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1947, and NGC certified it AU 53 BN in 2018 as the "Don Lutes, Jr. Discovery Specimen". A rumor went round the country that Henry Ford would trade a new car for one. NGC calls it false, and CoinWeek notes the company denied it repeatedly and never gave a car to anybody.

One more oddity, for completeness: a 1943 cent analysed at 86.41% tin was authenticated by NGC in 2019, and PCGS reports the view that it is an experimental piece. That is a single coin, and laboratory analysis is the only way anyone could have known.

The magnet test, and the two ways it lies

The Mint states the test plainly: "if it sticks to the magnet, it is not copper. If it does not stick, the coin might be of copper and should be authenticated by an expert." Both halves of that get gamed, in opposite directions.

A copper-looking 1943 cent that sticks to a magnet has been plated. PCGS: "a regular 1943 steel cent even if coated in copper will stick to a magnet." Nothing underneath the plating has changed.

A copper-looking 1943 cent that does not stick can still be a fake, because the second method does not involve steel at all. The Mint lists both together: the coin "has been counterfeited by coating steel cents with copper or by altering the dates of 1945, 1948, and 1949 pennies". An altered 1948 is a genuine bronze cent, so it is non-magnetic and it weighs the right 3.11 grams.

Magnet first, then a scale. Bronze is 3.11 grams against steel's 2.70, four tenths of a gram apart, and a kitchen scale that reads to a tenth costs less than posting the coin anywhere. Then the date under magnification: every genuine 1943 cent has a long-tailed 3 (NGC), and that is the detail an altered 5, 8 or 9 has to reproduce.

None of that is proof. PCGS's own estimate is that "tens of thousands of 1943 cents have been re-plated or different cents from the 1940's have been altered to make them appear as a genuine 1943 Copper Cent". The coin goes to PCGS or NGC, and it gets settled with the coin in somebody's hands, never from a photograph. Telling an error from damage covers what gets mistaken for one on the way there.

Varieties on the ordinary coin

NGC lists a doubled die obverse on the Philadelphia steel cent, obverse being the front: "a very popular doubled-die obverse variety" that shows "the lettering and date swollen but not fully separated", scarce and scarcer still in mint state. On the Denver coin it lists a repunched mint mark, FS-501, "among the most dramatic RPM varieties for the Lincoln Cent series and ... extremely popular", which shows a second D under or beside the first. Neither carries a guide figure in the sources below, so a suspected one is a question for a variety specialist rather than a number.

Why steel cents look so bad

NGC, on the plating: "with exposure to moisture the underlying steel often rusted, even with the zinc plating." A bright one with no rust on it is not the exception people hope for either: NGC's line on the coins that came through intact is that gems are "plentiful through MS 67", which is why the money in the table above sits in the MS-68 column and nowhere else. Do not clean them. Cleaning takes value off a coin and puts none back, and the grading page covers what a grader is looking at.

What people arrive believing

The coin is not silver. It is zinc plating over steel, the grey is the zinc, and no 1943 steel cent contains any silver. If you do have silver coins to weigh, the melt calculator does that arithmetic.

A million dollars is the figure most people have heard. Two private sales reached seven figures, in 2010 and 2012. The public records are the $840,000, $504,000 and $372,000 in the table above, and NGC guides a worn Philadelphia bronze at $60,000.

And the steel cent itself is common. A billion were struck in a single year and PCGS estimates 68 million Philadelphia survivors, which is why the guide figure for a worn one is five cents.

Buck is ours and we are selling it. On this coin it cannot do the thing that matters: whether a copper-colored 1943 cent is bronze or plated steel comes down to a magnet and a scale, and a photograph carries neither measurement. What it does is name the type from one shot of the front and one of the back, a coin at a time, on iPhone and Android, and put the guide's range beside it when the guide has one. That is an estimate, and never an offer to buy.

What this article is based on: the mintages, survival estimates, the plated-fake warning and the auction records are PCGS CoinFacts; the price guide rows, the commerce and rusting notes and the two varieties are NGC Coin Explorer; the magnet test, the counterfeiting methods, the "approximately 40" count and the hopper explanation are the United States Mint press release of 8 March 1999 and the Mint's page on the penny; the 2026 census, the circulated price band, the Lutes discovery coin and the Ford denial are CoinWeek and its report on the 1943-S. The auction house lot pages sit behind a sign-in, so those hammer figures rest on the PCGS and CoinWeek reporting of them. All read on 21 September 2026.