Mercury dime value: what a Winged Liberty dime is worth

A common Mercury dime is worth a little more than the silver in it. NGC's price guide puts the 1941, 1944 and 1945 Philadelphia coins at $5.75 in Good and $6.50 in About Uncirculated, on a guide dated 21 September 2026, against about $4.79 of silver in the coin that same day. A handful of the seventy-seven date-and-mint combinations in the series carry real money, and the 1916-D is the one everybody has heard of. They are in the table below; the rest of the run is $3 to $15 in Good, a band that straddles the value of the silver itself.

Those grades are the wear scale: Good is worn nearly flat, Fine still shows most of the detail, Very Fine a little more of it, Extremely Fine, written XF-40 in the tables below, has barely been rubbed, and About Uncirculated is a whisker off new. Mint State, written MS and then a number, means a coin that was never spent.

The proper name for the coin is the Winged Liberty Head dime. The figure is Liberty in a winged cap, for freedom of thought, and NGC is plain that "Mercury" is a misnomer that "was applied to it early on" and stuck. An earlier version of this page said the nickname caught on within weeks. No source we can find puts a time on it, so that is gone.

The silver in it

Each one is 2.50 grams at 90% silver, which is 2.25 grams of fine silver, or 0.0723 of a troy ounce as NGC states it. Silver was $66.248 an ounce on 21 September 2026, so the metal in the coin was worth $4.79, which is what NGC's own melt field showed that afternoon. It read $4.83 earlier the same day, which tells you how much weight to put on any single figure. The arithmetic is identical for every date from 1916 to 1945, and the silver melt calculator runs it at today's price.

CoinWeek's guide still quotes $2.04, from a silver price of $28.28 on 10 April 2024. It was right when it was written, and it is worth remembering when an old page tells you what your dime is worth. The same caution applies to parts of NGC's own guide: thirty of its Good figures for the series now sit below the $4.79 of silver in the coin, the 1931 at $3 among them, and every one of those thirty was last changed in 2019 or 2020.

Silver came out of the dime in 1965, per the US Mint, and CoinWeek's line is that the Mercury "remains the last dime the Mint struck entirely in .900 fine silver": the Roosevelt series that followed it spans both silver and clad. Which US coins are silver has the rest of the dates.

The Roosevelt dime replaced the Mercury and was released on 30 January 1946. The series' real losses came later: CoinWeek records that the silver boom of the early 1980s took "tens of thousands of original Mercury Dimes, including some unfortunate key and semi-key dates."

The 1916-D

Denver struck 264,000 of them, against 22,180,080 at Philadelphia and 10,450,000 at San Francisco. The reason is dull and completely decisive: shortly after Denver started on the new dimes, NGC records, an order came to "suspend this coinage and concentrate on quarter dollars for the remainder of the year." The first delivery was on 29 December 1916, so, as Q. David Bowers points out, the coin did not reach circulation until 1917.

NGC's guide, dated 12 May 2022, runs $850 in its Poor-to-About-Good column, $1,700 in Good, $3,750 in Fine, $7,500 in Extremely Fine and $18,000 at MS-63. PCGS's guide, on a capture of 24 April 2024, has $1,325 in Good, $3,600 in Fine and $8,000 in Extremely Fine. Real sales land in the same range: a PCGS G4 brought $1,403 and an AG3, a step below Good, $896.70, both at Heritage in August 2026 as listed on NGC's Auction Central. At the top, the Pogue collection coin, PCGS MS67FB, made $204,000 at Stack's Bowers in March 2020.

It is also one of the most counterfeited coins in America. NGC puts it at number 2 on its Top 50 Most Commonly Counterfeited US Coins, ranked by what people send in, and explains the trade: "The Philadelphia 1916 is quite common and affordable in comparison and this gives a counterfeiter the opportunity to add a tiny 'D' mintmark to make it appear to be the rare 1916-D. In addition to added mintmark fakes, complete counterfeits are also frequently seen." PCGS's David Hall puts a number on the flow: "PCGS sees an average of 5 to 10 counterfeits a week."

The common fake starts life as a genuine Philadelphia dime, so weight and diameter, 2.50 grams and 17.90 mm on PCGS's specification, check out on it. The real test is the steel stamp that struck the back of the coin: four of them are known for the issue, two with mint marks punched twice, which is how an authenticator tells a true D from an added one, or from an S that has been reshaped into a D. NGC's conclusion is one sentence long: "Professional authentication is thus mandatory in the purchase of any 1916-D dime."

The reputation runs ahead of the coin in one direction too. The 1916-D is not rare in every grade. NGC: "It has therefore gained a mythic reputation as a rarity, when in fact the supply of circulated examples is quite sufficient to meet demand." PCGS's David Hall does call it rare in all grades, so the two services disagree in words; PCGS's own estimate is that 10,000 survive.

The other dates worth checking

NGC counts 77 date-and-mint combinations in the series, not counting the overdates. Mintage is how many were struck, and the figures are NGC's price guide, which is updated one issue at a time, so the last column gives the date on each line.

The 1921 and 1921-D are low for a reason that had nothing to do with collectors: a post-war recession ran from late 1920 to the middle of 1923 and, in NGC's words, "nearly eradicated demand for additional coins." Denver struck no dimes again until 1924, and there are no Mercury dimes at all dated 1922, 1932 or 1933.

A small mintage is not the same thing as money, though. The 1931-S had 1,800,000 struck and NGC's guide has it at $5.25 in Good; the 1930-S, at 1,843,000, sits at $3.50. Both figures are from 9 October 2020. Meanwhile the 1925-D, with just over five million struck, reaches $140 in Extremely Fine on a guide line dated 9 December 2019, because what is scarce is a 1925-D that nobody wore out.

Full bands, the thing that moves the price

Full Bands, or FB, is a strike designation rather than a grade. The back of the coin shows a fasces, a bundle of rods tied around an axe, and the ties are pairs of horizontal bands. The central pair has to show complete separation, which is decided at the moment the coin is struck and never improves afterwards. NGC's own caution is the important half: "Lack of full bands doesn't mean a coin isn't Mint State; often, it simply denotes a weak strike."

How much it matters is best shown by the commonest coin in the series. The 1945 Philadelphia, 159,130,000 struck and easy to find in any grade, is what NGC calls "the rarest of the series with Full Bands." NGC's guide has it at $40 at MS-65, dated 21 September 2026, and at $12,750 at MS-65 with Full Bands, on a guide line last changed on 11 December 2019. PCGS estimates 400 survive with the designation in all grades. The record for one is $96,000, an MS67+FB at Heritage in January 2018.

CoinWeek names 1918-S, 1919-S, 1926-S, 1927-D and 1927-S as the other hard ones. The highest price the series has brought is a 1938-S graded PCGS MS68+FB, $364,250 at Legend Rare Coin Auctions on 27 June 2019.

The 1942 over 1941 overdate

A die is made by pressing a hub, the master punch that carries the design, into it. One die was pressed twice, once with a 1941 hub and once with a 1942 hub, and both dates stayed in it. CoinWeek is blunt about the story people usually tell: "No Mint employee punched a '2' over a '1.'" A second die with the same accident went to Denver, where the underdate is fainter, and that one was not widely known until the 1960s.

What to look for, from NGC's variety notes: "A very strong 41 lies under the 42. There is also doubling on the motto IN GOD WE TRUST." CoinWeek adds that the 4 shows strong doubling and a distinctive notch, and that it shows on circulated coins without strong magnification. PCGS's Ron Guth's warning is about the fakes: "beware of altered dates. If the date on a potential purchase does not match the image shown above, pass."

It is also not the rarity people expect. Guth again: in circulated grades "it is not rare at all, not even scarce, and can be called common." The money is in Mint State, where PCGS calls it one of the rarest Mint State Mercury dimes there is. A PCGS MS66FB sold for $120,000 at Heritage in January 2018, and an MS67+ for $90,000 at Heritage in January 2023, while the Denver coin's record is $73,438 for an MS66+FB at Legend in May 2019. At the other end, a PCGS VF20 brought $671 at Heritage in July 2026.

It was found in circulation, by Arnold Cohn of Kingston, New York, and announced in The Numismatic Scrapbook Magazine in March 1943.

The other varieties

The Micro S is the one most people meet. NGC's note on it: "Not rare but is very popular", and "exceedingly rare with Full Bands". A PCGS MS67 Full Bands made $3,120 at Heritage in July 2023.

One more to know about, because it is an alteration rather than a variety: 1941 dimes filed and tooled to read 1921. NGC's tell is in the numerals of the genuine coin, where "both numerals 1 are bowed inward at their centers and have broad bases", along with a "wide open loop to numeral 9."

Where the mint mark is

On the back, below and to the left of the fasces, which CoinWeek locates as left of the end of the olive branch. D is Denver, S is San Francisco, and no letter is Philadelphia. On a 1916 that small letter in an awkward place is the difference between $7.50 and $1,700 in Good, on NGC guide lines dated June and May 2022. Photograph it and zoom in; squinting at the coin will not settle it. Where to look for a mint mark covers the other denominations.

The designer's initials, an AW monogram, sit on the front at the lower right, about halfway between the Y of LIBERTY and the date. They are not a mint mark and they are on every coin in the series.

The bundle of rods on the back

The fasces is not a fascist emblem. CoinWeek's line on it: "Weinman's depiction was not fascist by intention." It is a Roman Republic symbol that also appears on the seal of the US Senate and in the Supreme Court building. The dime was designed in 1916, years before Italy had a Fascist government at all: the coin struck for that government's first anniversary is dated 1923. The Mint's reading of the pairing with the olive branch: "America's military readiness and the desire for peace."

What to do with one

Do not clean it. If what you have looks like a 1916-D, a 1921, a 1921-D or an overdate, the photograph has done all it can: a coin at that level is settled in person, by a grading service or a dealer with it on the counter, and the 1916-D in particular is one NGC says must be professionally authenticated before money changes hands. Coin grading basics explains what they are judging, and how to sell a coin covers what comes after.

Buck is ours, so weigh this accordingly. It names a coin from photographs of the two sides, one coin per shot, and its catalog is built by type, so on a Mercury dime it reaches the type and whatever range or single figure a price guide carries for it, as an estimate and never an offer. It cannot grade a coin, see full bands in a phone photo, or tell you whether a D was put on in Denver or in somebody's workshop.

What this article is based on: NGC's Coin Explorer, VarietyPlus, Auction Central and counterfeit-detection pages for the Mercury dime series, with its US Coin Price Guide read on 21 September 2026, each figure carrying its own last-changed date; PCGS CoinFacts and the PCGS price guide on Wayback Machine captures from 2020 to 2026; CoinWeek's guides to the series, the 1916-D, the 1945 and the 1942/1 overdate; mintages cross-checked against mercurydime.net; the silver price from gold-api.com on 21 September 2026; and the United States Mint's own page on the dime.