1946 nickel with no mint mark: worth five cents, with one exception

Philadelphia put no letter on its 1946 nickels, and out of a pocket or a jar yours is worth five cents. NGC's price guide runs from $0.10 for a well-worn one to $0.55 for one that barely circulated, Good and AU58 on the grading scale, on a guide last changed on 5 August 2020, and those are retail prices for a coin a dealer would bother to stock, never an offer to buy.

There is nothing scarce about the date. Philadelphia struck 161,116,000 of them, a figure PCGS and NGC both print, read on 21 September 2026, which is more than Denver's 45,292,200 and San Francisco's 13,560,000 put together, both of those NGC's. PCGS estimates 130,000,000 are still around in all grades.

The blank spot is the coin doing what it was supposed to do. Denver and San Francisco put a small letter to the right of Monticello in those years; Philadelphia put nothing there, which is how its nickels had always been until the war interrupted it.

Why 1945 has a big letter and 1946 does not

1946 is the year the nickel got its nickel back. PCGS puts the change in one line about this date: "This year the Mint transitioned back to producing Jefferson Nickels out of copper-nickel and eliminating any silver content. In all circulated grades most coins are very common." The Mint's own account of the same moment is about the letter: after the war, "when use of the regular alloy resumed, mint marks returned to their former positions, and the Mint no longer used Philadelphia's 'P'". What both are describing the end of is the 1942 to 1945 war nickel, 35% silver and carrying a large P, D or S over the dome of Monticello, which the nickel mint mark guide covers along with the rest of the positions.

The one 1946 nickel that sold for thousands

When production switched back, a small number of 1946 coins were struck on silver war planchets, the blank discs a coin is stamped from, left over from the war years. CoinWeek says "a few 1946 examples were struck on leftover silver-alloy blanks", and puts it in the same family as the 1943 bronze cent, the wrong-metal accident from the year the cent was made of steel.

One is certified. PCGS cert 27861087 is a 1946 five-cent piece graded F12, which on the grading services' scale is a well-worn coin (coin grading in plain terms), and labeled "War Nickel Planchet". It sold for $9,600 at Heritage Auctions on 21 November 2022, in the first part of the Misfits Collection of US error coinage. The cert page shows no example graded higher. How many exist in total is not documented in anything we could read: CoinWeek's "a few" is as precise as the published record gets.

The color is the one thing worth a second look: the silver alloy reads gray where copper-nickel reads warmer, so hold yours next to another nickel in the same light. The dome of Monticello tells you nothing here, since this error has no large mint mark over it and neither do the 161 million ordinary 1946s, so a blank dome only rules out a mislabeled war nickel. A gray tone on its own proves nothing either, and a coin like that needs metal testing and certification by PCGS or NGC, which means mailing it or handing it to a dealer with the coin in front of them.

Why the kitchen scale will not find it

Both alloys were made to the same 5.00 gram standard, so weight does not separate a silver 1946 from a copper-nickel one.

Francis Leroy Henning of Erial, New Jersey struck fake nickels in the 1950s from dies dated 1939, 1944, 1946, 1947 and 1953. His 1944s gave him away, since a real 1944 has the big wartime P and his did not; his 1946s had no such tell, because a real 1946 Philadelphia nickel has no letter either. CoinWeek's diagnostics for them: some average 4.85 grams and weigh in normally, but many run about 5.40 grams against the 5.00 standard; some of the back, or reverse, dies show a void in the left leg of the R in PLURIBUS; some pieces carry raised dots between GOD and WE, below Jefferson's cheek, and above the left side of Monticello. All of them look circulated. If your 1946 comes in heavy, a Henning is a likelier answer than a silver planchet, and CoinWeek calls them a collectible counterfeit for good reason: people buy them on purpose.

What an uncirculated 1946 brings

Coins that never circulated are a separate market from the one in your hand. MS means a coin that was never spent, and the number after it is how good the strike and the surfaces are; almost every 1946 that comes out of a jar grades below where this table starts.

NGC's note on the date explains the jump: the 1946 Philadelphia coins "were poorly made overall. Top-notch gems are rare." PCGS had graded 14 in MS67 with none finer when its population report was read on 21 September 2026, and its auction record for a plain MS67 is $1,763 at Heritage on 5 December 2013.

The last column is Full Steps, the designation for a coin struck sharply enough to show at least five complete steps at the base of Monticello. PCGS's Jaime Hernandez writes that in MS66 "with Full Steps it is almost unheard of" and that "probably less than 50 examples survive in MS66 displaying Full Steps". An MS67FS sold for $6,600 at Heritage in November 2021, as PCGS Auction Prices records it, and the PCGS auction record for a 1946 with Full Steps is $8,813 at Legend Rare Coin Auctions on 3 December 2020.

There is also a doubled die reverse for this date, FS-801, listed by both PCGS and NGC. A doubled die is a die cut with part of the design out of register with itself, so some of the lettering reads twice over. The PCGS guide of 21 September 2026 puts it at $550 in MS65 and $850 in MS66. No published description of where the doubling shows was available to us, so this page has nothing for you to check your coin against, and the only auction record PCGS carries for it is an eBay sale, which these pages do not count as a result. Take that one to a dealer who can put a loupe on it.

All of these are grades, and a grade is settled by a person turning the coin under a light, which is also the moment anything worth real money gets authenticated. How to sell a coin covers what comes after that.

Buck is ours, so weigh the next two sentences accordingly: it names the coin type from photographs of the two sides, one coin per shot, on iPhone and Android, and its catalog is built by type, so on a 1946 nickel it reaches the Jefferson nickel and the range a price guide carries for the type, and no further. It cannot read an alloy through a lens, count the steps on Monticello, spot a Henning or settle a grade from a photograph, which is most of what this page is about, and what it costs is on its own page.

Sources for this page, the exception first: PCGS's certification lookup for cert 27861087 and the Heritage sale it records; PCGS CoinFacts for the 1946 nickel and its Full Steps listing, with the PCGS price guide, PCGS Auction Prices and the PCGS population report, all read on 21 September 2026; NGC's Coin Explorer entry and price guide for the 1946 nickel, dated 5 August 2020; CoinWeek on the wartime nickels and on the Henning counterfeits; and the United States Mint on mint marks.