State quarter value and the quarter errors that really sell

Almost every state quarter is worth twenty-five cents. The program ran from 1999 to 2008, one design per state, five a year, and the Mint issued 34.2 billion quarters to the Federal Reserve Banks in fiscal 1999 to 2008, against 14.8 billion in the ten fiscal years before it. CoinWeek's summary of what that leaves, read on 21 September 2026, is blunt: the ordinary coins struck for circulation, worn or not, will probably never be worth much over face value, and the ones graded MS60 to MS64 are a dollar or less.

Grades are how every price below is quoted. The scale runs to 70. A coin that was never spent grades 60 or better and is called mint state, written MS, and the steps above MS65 are where the prices on this program start to move. Coin grading in plain terms has the rest.

The varieties the grading services actually attribute

Three listings cover ten years and fifty designs. PCGS attributes and prices the 2004-D Wisconsin Extra Leaf Low, the 2004-D Wisconsin Extra Leaf High and the 2005-P Minnesota Extra Tree, and nothing else from the program. Its own writer, Jaime Hernandez, calls the Wisconsin pair the only major varieties in the entire Statehood Quarters Program.

Which Wisconsin leaf is worth more has no single answer, and anyone who gives you one is reading a single source. CoinWeek has put the Low at about $115 and the High at about $180 in grades where the coin was never spent, with circulated Low Leaf examples at $40 to $65; the PCGS guide on 21 September 2026 has the High above the Low all the way to MS65 and then the Low above the High at MS67. Robert Ford found the first ones in late December 2004. Reports of hundreds turning up in bank-wrapped rolls made them look abundant, but most of those finds were around Tucson and San Antonio.

The mule, which is the one that pays

The head side of a 2000 state quarter was paired with a Sacagawea dollar reverse and struck on a dollar planchet, the blank disc a coin is stamped from: a dollar-sized golden coin with Washington's head on it. A coin made from two dies that do not belong together is called a mule. It is ranked first in 100 Greatest U.S. Error Coins, and it is one of the very few mules on regular coinage the US government has authenticated. CoinWeek counts 11 confirmed; Wikipedia says 19 were known as of August 2019. The first confirmed example sold for $29,900 in August 2000, and the highest price CoinWeek records is $75,000 in May 2003. You would know if you had one, because it does not look like a quarter.

Three that are not varieties, whatever the listing says

• 2005-P Kansas, "IN GOD WE RUST". Grease in the die kept the T from striking up. PCGS lists no variety for it: the price guide carries only the ordinary 2005-P Kansas. The diagnostic is a missing or weak T with the metal around it undisturbed, because a letter scraped off after the coin left the Mint leaves tool marks.
• 1999-P Delaware, the "spitting horse". A die crack running from the horse's mouth, which shows as a raised line. PCGS lists no variety for this one either. A cracked die is not a doubled die, where the design was pressed into the die twice and slightly offset.
• The $4,888 Delaware. PCGS's auction record for a 1999-P Delaware is $4,888 for an MS66 at Heritage in May 2008, and the listings that quote it leave off the rest of the line: the coin was struck on an experimental planchet, which makes it a mint error. An ordinary MS66 Delaware guides at $12.

Everything else being sold as a rare state quarter is an ordinary coin with damage or an ordinary coin with an optimistic listing, and CoinWeek's own note on the marketplaces is that prices swing wildly when sellers label minor flaws as rare errors. Error coins versus damage is the difference, and how to sell a coin is the step after you find a real one.

Where the money in this program actually is

The money is in condition, and not by a little. Neither NGC nor PCGS has certified an MS70 state quarter struck for circulation, per CoinWeek. MS69s run from about $275 for Ohio to $14,000 for Delaware on PCGS's guide, read on 21 September 2026, with the 1999-P Connecticut around $10,500. Take the Delaware up the scale and you can watch it happen: $5 at MS65, $22 at MS67, $900 at MS68, $14,000 at MS69, with a PCGS MS68 selling for $1,472 in December 2007. For a state quarter of no particular design, PCGS's type price is $3 at MS60, $5 at MS65, $20 at MS68 and $300 at MS69.

The five first-year designs, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and Connecticut, average about $5 ungraded in gem condition, which means MS65 and up. From 2005 the Mint gave the coins in its collector sets a satin finish, which NGC recognizes separately, and the handful of MS70 state quarters that exist came out of those sets.

Silver proofs

Every design was also struck in 90% silver at San Francisco for the silver proof sets. A proof is a coin made for collectors on polished dies and never meant to be spent, and its grades are written PR on the same 70-point scale. A quarter you spend weighs 5.670 g. A silver one weighs 6.25 g and holds 5.625 g of pure silver, which is 0.1808 troy ounces, or $11.97 of metal at the $66.17 an ounce PCGS showed on 21 September 2026. That figure, the melt value, is the floor under every one of them. The silver melt calculator keeps it current.

Five-piece silver quarter sets began in 2004. Of the multi-denomination silver proof sets, the scarcest are the 1999-S at 804,565 and the 2008-S at 763,887, Red Book figures as cited by CoinWeek. On that same day's PCGS guide the 1999-S Delaware silver proof is $16 in PR65 Deep Cameo, PCGS's label for the strongest frosting against a mirror field, and $25 in PR69. Then it jumps to $400 in PR70, and one PR70 Deep Cameo sold for $17,250 at Heritage on 4 December 2007.

A quarter you found in change is not one of these. Every S-mint state quarter from 1999 to 2008 is a proof, because San Francisco did not strike circulation quarters until 2012, and even those went out to collectors in bags and rolls and never into commerce. A coin with no letter at all came from Philadelphia, which a quarter with no mint mark covers, and where to look for a mint mark shows the position.

The proof sets were not an investment

CoinWeek has tracked the resale prices. Five-piece clad proof sets issued at $13.95 reached about $70 in 2003 and now sell for $5 or less, close to a complete loss. The 1999-S nine-coin silver proof set, issued at $31.95, peaked near $300 in the mid 2000s and is offered around $85 now. Some of the 90% silver sets held their value. The clad ones did not, and there were a great many of them.

America the Beautiful, the sequel

From 2010 to 2021 the Mint did the same thing again with 56 national park and site designs, five a year and one in 2021, running from Hot Springs to the Tuskegee Airmen. The value answer is the same, because they are quarters.

The oddity of that series is the five-ounce silver version of each design, three inches across, .999 fine, with the weight and the fineness incused into the edge and a nominal face value of twenty-five cents. They were the first five-ounce three-inch silver bullion coins the Mint ever made. Five troy ounces of silver came to $330.85 at the 21 September 2026 price.

What to do with a folder of them

Complete it, because completing it costs face value and that was always the point. The Mint's own estimate is that 147 million Americans collected these, and Delaware opening in 1999 with Hawaii closing at the end of 2008 is a decade that got a lot of people into coins. If the folder has a 1776-1976 quarter wedged in the front, that one has its own article.

If you want the folder checked, there are two things worth looking for: the extra husk on the corn of a 2004-D Wisconsin and the treeline on a 2005-P Minnesota, under magnification, next to a photograph of a confirmed example. Anything that looks right goes to PCGS or NGC, because an attribution is a label from a grading service, and nobody buys one of these on the strength of a phone picture. If the same drawer had paper money in it, the dollar bill serial number checker is the equivalent for notes.

Buck is ours. It identifies the coin from a photograph and shows an estimate, a range where the price guide has one, and never an offer to buy. It does not attribute varieties, so it will not tell you that the husk on your 2004-D is the extra one, and a photo cannot settle a grade, which on this program is very nearly all of the money: $5 and $900 are the same Delaware quarter three grades apart. Photograph one quarter at a time, front and then back, on iPhone or Android.

What this article is based on: the United States Mint's pages on the 50 State Quarters Program, the America the Beautiful Quarters and the quarter itself for the program figures, the weights and the five-ounce coins; the PCGS Price Guide and PCGS CoinFacts, read on 21 September 2026, for the varieties, the mintages, the guide figures and the auction records; CoinWeek on what the state quarters are worth now, the program twenty years on and the modern quarters worth money; and Wikipedia's 50 State quarter mintage table and its page on the program as the second reading on the totals, the silver weight and the number of mules known.