Bicentennial quarter value: what a 1776-1976 quarter is worth

A 1776-1976 quarter out of somebody's change is worth twenty-five cents. Philadelphia and Denver struck 1,669,902,855 of them, which is most of the answer, and CoinWeek, writing on the coin in 2025, prices an uncirculated one, never spent and never graded, at about $2. What is worth more is the 40% silver version the Mint sold in collector sets, and the very few ordinary ones that survived in near-perfect condition. Both are covered below.

Values here are quoted by grade, because the guides quote nothing else. The grading services run a 1 to 70 scale: 60 and above is mint state, their name for a coin that never went into a till, and every step from 63 to 68 is a cleaner example of the same common coin at a price that climbs out of all proportion to the step. Coin grading in plain terms has the rest of it.

The dual date, and why there is no 1975 quarter

There is no quarter dated 1975, and none dated 1976 on its own. Public Law 93-127 put new designs on the quarter, the half dollar and the dollar for the two hundredth birthday, and the Mint's own page says flatly that it is impossible to tell a quarter minted in 1975 from one minted in 1976, because both read 1776-1976. The quarter was released on 18 August 1975. Jack Ahr of Arlington Heights, Illinois drew the colonial drummer on the back, one of three designs chosen in a national competition with a $5,000 award.

The dual date is also where identifying apps get this coin wrong. Anything that takes the first four digits off the face gets 1776 and starts looking for an eighteenth-century record, which is two centuries from where the coin belongs. Ours did exactly that until we fixed it. An app that tells you your Bicentennial quarter is colonial has told you about itself.

The silver ones, and the S that does not prove silver

San Francisco struck 40% silver Bicentennial quarters for three-coin collector sets, sold alongside the silver half dollar and dollar. Congress had required at least 45 million silver collector coins across the three denominations. PCGS lists struck totals of 11,000,000 silver uncirculated quarters and 4,000,000 silver proofs, the mirror-finish coins made for collectors; Wikipedia gives net figures of 4,908,319 and 3,998,621, and CoinWeek says 4.9 million and "nearly four million". Scarce they are not, but the silver is real.

An S on its own proves nothing, because San Francisco also struck 7,059,099 clad proofs for the 1975 and 1976 proof sets. What separates them is the metal: PCGS lists the silver coin at 5.75 g and the clad one, with no silver in it at all, at 5.67 g. Eight hundredths of a gram is not something anybody judges by hand, so this is a job for a scale, which is precisely why the myth survives. Philadelphia and Denver coins are clad without exception. A Bicentennial quarter with nothing to the right of Washington is explained on its own page.

A 40% silver Bicentennial quarter holds 2.30 g of pure silver, which is 0.0739 troy ounces, and the PCGS bullion ticker showed silver at $66.17 an ounce on 21 September 2026. That is $4.89 of metal, the whole of its melt value, before any collector pays anything for the coin on top. The silver melt calculator does that sum at today's price.

What each version is actually worth

DCAM is PCGS's label for a proof whose raised design looks frosted against mirror fields. That $920 clad proof was 2010, and CoinWeek puts the same coin at $90 to $100 on eBay now, not far off the $120 guide figure beside it.

PCGS's auction record for the Philadelphia coin, $2,520 for an MS64 at Heritage in August 2024, gets quoted a great deal and should not be. PCGS's own guide values an MS64 at $10 and gives no reason at all for the price that coin brought. The steadier picture of the ordinary coin is CoinWeek's 2025 table: $10 at MS65, $25 at MS66, $50 at MS67 for a Philadelphia coin, $60 at MS67 and $2,800 at MS68 for a Denver one. The $5,000 in the table above is the top-population toned MS68, at GreatCollections in 2023.

The grading counts put that market in proportion. Through February 2025, CAC, NGC and PCGS together had graded 7,500 1976 and 1976-D quarters, out of 1.67 billion struck. As of September 2025 the 1976-D existed in MS68 in 14 PCGS holders and 15 NGC ones.

The errors that are real, and the one that is not

The 1976-D has two doubled dies on the front of the coin, FS-101 and FS-102, both attributed by PCGS and NGC. FS-101 shows doubling on LIBERTY and, on an early state of the die, on IN GOD WE TRUST and the date as well; FS-102 shows moderate doubling on LIBERTY alone, and CoinWeek, reading the Cherrypickers' Guide, says it may prove very rare. Heritage called FS-101 easily the most significant die variety of the Bicentennial type. As of September 2024 PCGS had recorded 59 FS-101 and 97 FS-102 grading events, NGC 23 and 3. Neither carries an auction result in the sources read for this page, only those counts.

A 1976-D die cap, one of the major striking errors, brought $2,880 at Stack's Bowers. CoinWeek dates that sale only as an August 19 sale, with no year, so that is as far as this page can take it.

Then the overstrikes. Mike Byers, writing for Mint Error News on CoinWeek on 4 May 2020, documents a unique 1776-1976 S proof quarter struck over a 1967 Roosevelt dime, certified Proof 67 by NGC, and says two proof Bicentennial quarters struck over struck cents are known as well. These are unique authenticated pieces, and nobody finds one in a roll.

The "filled" D is the one that is not an error. A worn 1976-D was reportedly sold on eBay for $1,799.95 as a rare filled mint mark. CoinWeek's answer is that the Cherrypickers' Guide lists no repunched mint marks for the 1976-D and the leading grading services attribute none, and that what is visible on a coin like that is wear. Its own 1976-D guide adds that Variety Vista lists one. A genuine repunched mint mark shows two separated impressions of the letter. Error coins versus damage is the general version of this problem, and it is the commonest way people lose money on this coin.

Why everyone thinks they are rare

CoinWeek calls the "worth thousands" version of this coin a big lie and fraud spread by search-engine spam, which is where most people meet it. The real mechanism is duller: 1.67 billion coins went into circulation in a design that looked different enough that people put them in drawers, and a coin that everybody saved is the definition of a common one.

The half dollar and the dollar in the same series

The half dollar and the dollar were redesigned and dual dated the same way, the half taking Independence Hall on its back for those two years. The Mint's final circulating figures are 521.9 million halves and 220.6 million dollar coins. On the PCGS guide the 1776-1976 half is the only clad Kennedy above $1 at grade 40, the worn but whole end of that 1 to 70 scale, at $2, which is the entire premium two hundred years of history bought. What a Kennedy half dollar is worth has that series, and 1974 is the last year before the dual date.

If you are working through a whole jar of quarters, are state quarters worth anything covers the 1999 to 2008 run, and a quarter with no mint mark answers the other question people ask about this denomination.

Buck is ours, so read this accordingly. A photograph gets you the type and, where the price guide carries a range for that type, the range, and on this coin the type is the easy part. It cannot tell you whether a 1776-1976-D is the MS67 that guides at $100 or the MS68 that guides at $3,750, because that is the grade, and a grade gets settled with the coin in somebody's hands. One coin per shot, front and back, on iPhone and Android.

What this article is based on: the United States Mint's pages on Bicentennial coins and medals and on the quarter for the law, the designer, the release date and the circulating totals; the PCGS Price Guide and PCGS CoinFacts, read on 21 September 2026, for the mintages, the guide figures and the auction records; CoinWeek on the coin in 2025, the 1976-D, the clad proof, the eBay prices and the overstruck proof; Wikipedia's Washington quarter mintage table for the net silver figures; and the Heritage lot page for the date and the grading service on the $6,462.50 sale.