1978 quarter no mint mark: what it's worth, and why the variety list is empty

A 1978 quarter with nothing where the mint mark goes came from Philadelphia, which put no letter on a quarter until 1980, and worn out of a pocket it is worth its 25 cents. Philadelphia struck 521,452,000 of them that year, more than it struck in 1977. Denver added 287,373,152 with a D on them, and San Francisco made 3,127,781 proofs, the polished collector coins sold in sets, which carry an S. Since 1968 the branch letter has been on the front of the coin, to the right of Washington, and where to look for a mint mark shows the spot.

One caveat on all that. Wikipedia's account of the series says quarters were struck at the West Point Mint from 1977 to 1979 and "they bore no mint mark"; the US Mint's own West Point page records Bicentennial quarters there in 1976 and stops, and neither gives a figure for 1978. So a blank 1978 quarter may have been made at West Point, nothing on the coin will ever say, and it is worth the same either way. The quarter mint mark hub lays the whole West Point question out.

No 1978 variety is listed anywhere

A variety is a flaw cut into the dies themselves, so it repeats on every coin those dies struck, which is why collectors pay for one. NGC's VarietyPlus catalog covers the Washington quarter with 156 entries on coins struck for circulation and 26 on proofs, going back to 1932. Not one of them is dated 1978. PCGS lists a single coin under its related varieties for the date, and that coin is the plain 1978 quarter.

No doubled die, no repunched mint mark, nothing with a name and a number attached to it. For comparison, 1964 has five listed varieties and 1966 has one. An empty list is still an answer: there is nothing on this coin a magnifier is going to find.

The one 1978 error with a price behind it

A single 1978 Philadelphia quarter error has a documented sale. It was struck once normally, failed to leave the press, and was hit a second time with most of the coin outside the dies, so it carries two overlapping images of the design with the second thrown far to one side. NGC graded it MS63, low in the part of the 70-point scale kept for coins that were never spent, and it brought $293.75 in Heritage's Long Beach signature auction, sale 1206, lot 10428. Heritage dates the sale 8 June 2014 and shows the price to nobody who is not signed in; the figure comes from NGC's Auction Central, which files the same lot under 4 June, the day the auction opened.

That is the entire documented error record for the date. If yours shows a doubled outline sitting flat and smooth on top of the letters, that is machine doubling, which happens after the strike and adds nothing to the price: how to tell an error from damage covers the difference.

Four 1978 sales nobody could identify

NGC's Auction Central lists four more 1978 Philadelphia quarters, in grades where the guide asks a few dollars, that sold for hundreds:

The MS60 went for $348 where the PCGS guide asks $1 at that grade, and the MS64 for $264 where it asks $5. A grade alone does not do that, so these are almost certainly mint errors of one kind or another. We cannot tell you which kind: the lot pages at both houses were blocked when this page was written, and the listings give only the price, grade, house and lot number. It is a loose end, and dressing it up as anything else would be worse than leaving it here.

What the guides ask, grade by grade

Read on 21 September 2026. NGC's guide for clad quarters was last updated on 21 March 2022 and disagrees in both directions: $10 at MS65 where PCGS asks $20, $235 at MS67 where PCGS asks $175. A quarter that has been spent is in none of those rows; worn, it is the 25 cents it says it is.

One number here has no explanation behind it. PCGS estimates that about 182.5 million 1978 quarters still exist in all grades, roughly 11 million of them in MS65 or better, against an estimate of 983,967 coins in MS65 or better for 1977, the date beside it. The commoner coin is the dearer one: $20 against $10 at MS65 on the same day. None of the sources here says why, and neither can we, so the 1977 quarter page simply carries its own figures.

Higher up the scale the date thins out fast. NGC's census on 21 September 2026 records 181 coins in MS66, 40 in MS67, 2 in MS67+ and none at all in MS68. Jaime Hernandez writes for PCGS that in MS67 "they are scarce with less than a hundred examples graded by PCGS with none being graded in higher condition". The highest sale PCGS reports for the date is $2,875 for an MS67+ on 25 March 2021, and it records that as an eBay sale rather than an auction house result. Ordinary results are much smaller: NGC lists three MS67 sales at $192, $164.50 and $123.38 between January 2015 and June 2019. Coin grading in plain terms explains where the numbers come from.

What to check on the one in your hand

Put it on a scale that shows two decimal places. A normal 1978 quarter reads 5.67 grams and measures 24.30 millimeters across, it has grooves cut around the edge, and it is copper and nickel bonded over a pure copper core, which is what makes the copper stripe you can see on the rim. A coin that misses the weight badly, or has a smooth edge, or is visibly smaller than the rest of your change, is worth carrying to a dealer or sending to a grading service. Photographs settle nothing at that point, ours included, and if it turns out to be something do not clean it first, because cleaning takes value off. How to sell a coin covers what happens after that.

Buck is ours, so weigh the next two sentences accordingly. From photographs of the two sides, one coin per shot, it will tell you that you are holding a Washington quarter and show the range a price guide puts on that type; it keeps no figure for a single year, and a grade is not something a picture decides. On a date whose whole story is an empty variety list and four lots nobody could open, that is the easy half and none of the rest (what it costs).

NGC did most of the work behind this page: VarietyPlus for the missing 1978 variety, Auction Central for every price actually realized, the census for how many high-grade coins exist, and Coin Explorer for the weight and the composition. PCGS CoinFacts supplied the mintages, the survival estimates and Jaime Hernandez's comment, and the PCGS price guide the grade-by-grade figures. The United States Mint's page on mint marks is the source for 1980, Heritage's lot page describes the double struck coin, and Wikipedia's article on the Washington quarter is where the unmarked West Point strikes come from. Everything was read on 21 September 2026.