Buffalo nickel value: what an Indian Head nickel is worth

A worn Buffalo nickel of an ordinary date is worth a few dollars. NGC's price guide puts the 1935, 1936 and 1937 Philadelphia coins at $1.25 in Good, $3 to $3.50 in Fine and $6 in Extremely Fine, on a guide last changed on 20 September 2024. PCGS's guide is higher for the same kind of coin: $3, $5 and $9 across those three grades for the 1936, 1937 and 1938-D, on a capture of its guide dated 19 February 2026. Both are guide figures and neither is an offer to buy. The key dates, eight low-mintage issues, run from $17.50 to $275 in Good, and the varieties people hunt for, the three-legger and the overdates, have a table of their own.

Those grades are the wear scale. Good is a coin worn nearly flat, with the outline and the rim left. Fine still shows most of the detail. Extremely Fine, written XF-40 in the tables below, has barely been rubbed. Mint State, written MS and then a number, means a coin that was never spent at all, and it is where the money on this series lives.

Buffalo nickel and Indian Head nickel are the same coin. CoinWeek uses both names, and both grading services file the series as Buffalo Five Cents, 1913 to 1938. James Earle Fraser designed it, the US Mint's own description of the back is "an American bison", and there is no silver in any of them: 75% copper and 25% nickel, 5.00 grams, 21.20 mm across, per PCGS CoinFacts. So there is no metal value holding the price up from underneath. If you are working through a jar, the silver is in the dimes, quarters and halves, and the melt calculator does that arithmetic.

Why the date is gone, and what a dateless one is worth

The date sits on the front at the lower left, on the shoulder of the portrait, with Fraser's initial F below it. That is a high spot on a coin that spent decades in tills. NGC's line on the first year is blunt: the shallow dates of 1913 meant "any coins entering circulation would be dateless within 15-20 years."

The Mint never really fixed it. The redesign of 1913 sank the denomination into a recess on the back, where it had been wearing flat within months, and NGC notes that "during all his modifications, Barber never addressed the problem of the date wearing down too rapidly." From 1919 the numerals are thicker and more deeply cut, which NGC says "helped only slightly."

A coin with no date cannot be pinned to an issue, and we found no dollar figure for a dateless Buffalo nickel in any source we would quote. Some of them have had the date brought back with acid, and NGC's verdict on the result is short: such coins "have value, but they are not numerically gradeable." The tell is a dull etched patch around the date.

Where the mint mark is

On the back, under the words FIVE CENTS. D is Denver, S is San Francisco, and no letter at all is Philadelphia, which is the normal state of affairs and not a mistake. Where to look for a mint mark covers the other denominations, and if the coin in your hand turns out to be a Jefferson nickel with a blank spot beside Monticello, that one has its own page.

The two kinds of 1913

The design changed inside the first year, so 1913 is the one date that comes two ways. On Type 1 the bison stands on a raised mound with FIVE CENTS across it, which was wearing flat by April, so Chief Engraver Charles Barber "cut away the mound, creating an exergue into which the denomination was set", in NGC's words. An exergue is the strip of recessed ground below a design, and Type 2 is what the Mint struck for the rest of the series.

Which one you have matters at two of the three mints. NGC's guide has the 1913-S Type 1 at $45 in Good and the 1913-S Type 2 at $275, on guide lines of 13 March 2024 and 17 August 2021. At Denver it is $17.50 against $115, on lines of 2 May 2022 and 17 August 2021. At Philadelphia both are $10, on lines of 29 August 2022 and 16 August 2021.

Buffalo nickel key dates and values

Mintage is how many were struck, and a key date is an issue struck in small numbers, which is what makes it worth more than the rest. The eight below are low-mintage issues that NGC's guide prices well clear of the common dates, and they are not the only ones above that level: the 1913-S Type 1 is $45 in Good on a guide line of 13 March 2024, and the 1920-D is $300 in Extremely Fine on one of 18 August 2021. NGC changes its guide one issue at a time, so the last column gives the date on each line.

The 1926-S is the lowest mintage in the series and the only issue under a million. PCGS's David Hall on it: "Excluding the 1918/7-D overdate, this issue is THE key date to the Buffalo nickel series." Thirty dollars in Good, $900 in Extremely Fine, then $10,000 at MS-63 and $70,000 at MS-65, all on the same NGC guide of 3 November 2025. PCGS estimates 11,000 survive in all grades, 500 of them Mint State and 20 grading MS-65 or better. The other 10,500 are worn coins, and that is where almost every 1926-S anybody finds belongs.

There were no Buffalo nickels dated 1922, 1932 or 1933, and 1938 was struck at Denver alone. The highest mintage of the run is the 1936 Philadelphia at 118,997,000.

The varieties, and how to tell them

Every one of these is a fault in a die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the coin. A die keeps working with the fault in it, so every coin it makes carries the same mark, and that is what collectors pay for.

Those sales are the top of each market, and every one of those coins was graded by a service first. The everyday end looks like this: a PCGS XF40 three-legger brought $1,098 at Heritage in August 2026, and a 1918/7-D graded G4, a coin worn nearly flat, brought $732 at Heritage in May 2026. Both numbers come from NGC's Auction Central listings.

Two things about the three-legged nickel. NGC says counterfeits and altered coins exist and that it should be authenticated by experts. And NGC doubts the story everybody tells about how it was made: the usual account blames polishing away clash marks, while NGC reads the evidence in both dies as repolishing "to smooth their fields by removing the heavy furrows that form on overused dies."

There are also die states that collectors chase which are not varieties at all. Two Feathers, where polishing took out the shallowest of the three headdress feathers, and No F, where the designer's initial is missing from an otherwise sharp coin. NGC lists both across many dates and describes them as die states rather than true varieties.

What people get wrong

• A small mintage does not make a coin dear. The 1931-S has the second-lowest mintage in the series, and NGC's guide has it at $17.50 in Good. Speculators bought it new and sat on it, so NGC calls it "among the more common Buffalo Nickels" in Mint State, where "worn examples are less often seen than new ones."
• The three-legged coin is a late die state, not a design. NGC's words: "Not a true variety, as the missing leg feature was present in the die when new, it is more properly described as a late die state (LDS) striking." NGC adds that it "is not rare in worn condition, but pieces grading XF and higher are scarce in relation to the great demand."
• A weak front leg is a different coin. On the genuine variety the leg is missing "aside from the hoof." A thin, partly missing leg is the cheaper die state NGC files as 3-1/2 Legs, which it catalogues on the 1936-D and on several other dates.
• Nobody punched an 8 over a 7 in 1918. Dies take their design from a hub, a master stamp, and NGC's reading of this one is "rehubbing a 1917 dated die with a 1918 dated die." Both dates stayed on it. The 1942 over 1941 dime came about the same way.
• The portrait is not one chief. The face on the front, NGC says, "was a composite of three chiefs who had posed for him years earlier." The names usually attached to it, Iron Tail, Two Moons and Big Tree, are what CoinWeek calls numismatic tradition.
• It is a bison. The Mint says so on its own page. CoinWeek points out that bison and buffalo are distinct species, which has never stopped anybody.

What to do with one

Do not clean it, and do not let anyone bring the date back with acid: NGC will not give a number grade to a coin that has had that done. Photograph it flat under indirect light, both faces, and read the date and the mint mark before deciding anything. How to photograph a coin is the short version of that.

If what you have looks like one of the coins in the tables above, it stops being a photo question. Counterfeits of the three-legger and the overdates are documented, the grade is most of the price, and both of those are settled by a person holding the coin: a grading service, or a dealer with a loupe and the coin on the counter. How to sell a coin covers what happens next.

Buck is ours, so weigh this accordingly. Photograph the front, then the back, and it comes back with the type and whatever the price guide carries for it: a range on most priced types, a single figure on about a quarter of them, and no price at all on roughly one type in five. The catalog is built by type, so it holds no separate figure for your year. It cannot grade the coin, tell a genuine three-legger from an altered one, or put back a date that has worn away.

What this article is based on: NGC's Coin Explorer and VarietyPlus entries for the Buffalo five cents series and its US Coin Price Guide, read on 21 September 2026, each guide figure carrying its own last-changed date; PCGS CoinFacts and the PCGS price guide, read on Wayback Machine captures dated between June 2024 and September 2026, the price-guide figures on the capture of 19 February 2026; NGC Auction Central for the realized prices; CoinWeek's guides to the type, the 1918/7-D, the 1916 doubled die and the 1937-D three-legged nickel; mintages from PCGS CoinFacts, cross-checked against buffalonickel.org and the Wikipedia table of US nickel mintages, each of which misprints a few rows, so what is printed here is where the three agree; and the United States Mint's own page on the nickel.