Wheat penny value: the common ones and the key dates

A wheat penny from the 1940s or 1950s, worn from circulation, guides at five cents. NGC's price guide puts a common date at $0.05 in the lowest collectible grade, $1.50 at MS-63 BN, the first uncirculated grade it quotes, and $5 at MS-65, rows last updated on 7 November 2022. That is the answer for almost every coin in almost every jar, because 25,817,570,757 of them were struck between 1909 and 1958. Six issues guide at $85 or more even worn, and they are all listed below.

The name comes from the back: two ears of wheat, used from 1909 to 1958. Victor David Brenner designed the coin for Lincoln's 100th birthday, which made Lincoln the first president on a circulating US coin (US Mint). The metal is 3.11 grams of bronze. In 1943 it was steel, more than a billion of them in the one year, and that coin has its own article. From 1944 to 1946 it was brass with the tin left out.

The dates that are not common

The codes in the table are the 70 point grading scale, which the grading article sets out: G-4 is a well worn coin with the design gone flat, XF-40 (extremely fine, written EF-40 on some guides) is slight wear with most detail sharp, and MS-63 BN is a coin that never circulated whose copper has gone brown.

Those are NGC price guide figures, and each row carries its own date: the 1909-S VDB, the 1955 doubled die and the common-date row 7 November 2022; the 1909 VDB 19 October 2022; the 1909-S and 1910-S 24 July 2023; the 1911-S 7 August 2023; the 1912-S 8 August 2023; the 1913-S, 1914-S and 1914-D 18 August 2023; the 1915-S 21 August 2023; the 1924-D 18 June 2021; the 1926-S and 1931-S 12 July 2020; the 1931-D 29 August 2019; the 1922 No D 11 June 2019. The common-date row is NGC's 1956-D, standing in for the ordinary run. A guide figure is an asking price for one coin in a dealer's tray, and what someone offers for yours is a separate number.

Only two dates in the whole series were struck fewer than a million times, the 1909-S VDB and the 1931-S (NGC). Philadelphia struck no cents at all in 1922, the one year in the series that is true of, which is where the 1922 No D comes from.

Where to look for the mint mark

Under the date on the front. S is San Francisco, D is Denver, and no letter is Philadelphia, which is the full answer for every blank year. Denver only started striking cents in 1911, so a 1909 or 1910 cent has either an S or nothing.

The letter is most of the money on this coin. NGC guides a worn 1909-S VDB at $875 and the Philadelphia 1909 VDB, same initials and no letter, at $8. Between the two San Francisco coins of 1909 the initials alone are the difference between $95 and $875.

The 1909-S VDB, and how it gets faked

The initials sit at the bottom center of the back, between the wheat stalks, with the S under the date on the front. Brenner's initials were on the first coins released in August 1909, came off after a public row, and returned in 1918 in small letters on Lincoln's shoulder, which is why a 1944 cent has V.D.B. on the bust and a 1914 one does not.

NGC calls it an "often counterfeited or altered issue" and says knowledge of the four known dies used for the front, told apart by where the mint mark sits, "is key to authenticating" it. The two usual fakes are initials added to a plain 1909-S and an S added to a Philadelphia coin. Telling either from the real thing is in-person work with the coin in hand, and a photograph does not settle it.

It is not rare in the way people expect, either. NGC: "many were saved at the time of issue ... The narrow spread over so many grades confirms that there is little difference in rarity below the gem level." PCGS estimates 50,000 survivors in all grades. A PCGS XF40 example sold through Heritage in July 2026 for $1,342.

The 1914-D is the harder coin, despite the larger mintage: NGC gives it "the smallest surviving population" of the keys, and PCGS estimates 230 survivors at MS65 or better against 3,000 for the 1909-S VDB. It gets faked two ways, and the second one is neat: a D added to a Philadelphia 1914, or the first 4 shaved off a 1944-D. The V.D.B. on the shoulder gives that second one away every time, because it should not be there in 1914.

The 1931-S is faked by adding an S to a 1931 Philadelphia cent or by altering the date on another 1930s San Francisco coin (NGC).

The 1922 No D and the 1955 doubled die

Both are accidents at the die, and both carry real money.

The 1922 No D comes from Denver, the only mint striking cents that year. A die, the steel stamp that presses the design into the blank, lost its mint mark: through erosion or a grease-filled cavity in NGC's account, or filed down after a die clash in PCGS's. The coins it struck have no letter at all. The one NGC guides at $700 in G-4 is the Strong Reverse pair: a sharp back, the second 2 of the date stronger than the first, TRUST sharp (PCGS). The Weak Reverse and Weak D coins are worth far less, and telling them apart is the whole job. A PCGS AU58 made $9,600 at Heritage in July 2023, and a PCGS MS62 $16,800 in August 2020.

The 1955 doubled die obverse came from one die pair, and PCGS puts the number released into circulation at 20,000 to 24,000, many of them in cigarette-pack change. The doubling is bold on the date, LIBERTY and IN GOD WE TRUST. Genuine coins also show vertical die polishing lines to the left of the T in CENT (PCGS).

Smaller varieties exist and are a specialist's business: an S punched over a horizontal S on the 1909-S, a D punched over an S on the 1944 Denver cent, which NGC guides at $475 in MS-63 red-brown as of 15 February 2023, and a doubled die on some 1936 cents.

Color is worth more than people expect

Copper goes from red to red-brown to brown as it oxidizes, and the guides follow that with RD, RB and BN after the grade. At MS-65 NGC guides the 1909-S VDB at $4,000 brown and $8,250 red, the 1914-D at $7,150 and $17,500, the 1955 doubled die at $8,750 and $47,500.

Do not try to make a brown coin red. The gap between those two figures is the temptation, and cleaning a coin removes value.

What people believe when they get here

That every wheat penny is worth something. The 1940s and 1950s dates are the five-cent rows above, and there are billions of them.

That a 1909-S VDB is rare in any grade. NGC says the opposite below gem, and 50,000 are thought to survive.

That the 1914-D is the easy key because more were struck. Mintage is not survival, and on survival the 1914-D is the hard one.

That the 1922 plain cent is a Philadelphia coin. Philadelphia struck none that year.

That a worn 1931-S is common because so many uncirculated ones exist. NGC: "1931-S cents are fairly plentiful in Mint State while being rare in worn condition. Ones grading less than Very Fine are genuinely rare." Collectors could still buy unworn ones from the Mint at face value plus postage in June 1934, which is why the unworn ones are around and the worn ones are not.

What to do with a jar of them

Sort by date and mint mark, and pull three piles: anything in the table above, anything dated 1909 to 1915 with an S or a D under the date, and anything where the date or the lettering looks doubled. Leave the rest alone, and clean none of it. How to sell a coin covers where the first pile goes.

Buck is ours and we are selling it. The grade is most of the price on every row in that table, and a grade is not a thing a photograph of either face settles. What the app does is read one coin at a time, front and then back, keep a running total for the session and drop the batch into a collection in one tap, so a pile of them turns into a list without typing every date into a search box.

What this article is based on: the mintages, the price guide rows, the series history, the fakes and the die varieties are NGC Coin Explorer; the survival estimates, the 1922 and 1955 die accounts and the polishing-line test are PCGS CoinFacts; the designer and the wheat reverse are the United States Mint; the auction results are Heritage lots as listed by NGC Auction Central, whose lot pages sit behind a sign-in, and the mintage table was checked against Wikipedia's Lincoln cent mintage figures. All read on 21 September 2026.