1982 penny no mint mark: copper or zinc, large or small date

A 1982 cent with no mint mark is a Philadelphia coin, or one of the unmarked cents San Francisco and West Point struck the same year, and worn it is worth one cent. What makes 1982 worth a page is that the Mint changed the metal during the year and redrew the date at the same time, so four different ordinary coins were issued with no letter on them: large date in bronze, small date in bronze, large date in zinc, small date in zinc. All four are common. The 1982 cent that sells for five figures has a D under the date.

Weigh it first

The change was from an alloy that is nearly all copper to a zinc core with a thin copper skin, and it dropped the weight. NGC states it plainly: "In 1982 the composition of the cent was changed to copper-plated [zinc] and the weight was reduced from 3.11 grams to 2.5 grams." A kitchen scale that reads to a tenth of a gram settles it in two seconds.

CoinWeek's working tolerance for a genuine bronze cent, written up in 2019, is 2.98 to 3.24 grams. The famous 1982-D discovery coin weighed 3.08 grams, and NGC called that "well within the Mint's tolerance for bronze cents". CoinWeek reports that the man who found it used "a simple see-saw balance scale he fashioned using craft sticks and toothpicks".

The old alloy goes by three names and they all mean one coin. NGC labels it brass, PCGS prints 95% copper with 5% zinc, and CoinWeek and the auction houses say bronze. On a scale it is 3.11 grams either way, and this page says bronze.

Large date or small date

Hold two 1982 cents side by side and the difference shows up in the numerals. CoinWeek's description of the small date: "the 2 has a curvier base, the tops of the date numerals must all meet along the same imaginary plane, and the inscription LIBERTY and motto IN GOD WE TRUST also appear a bit smaller." That last part is the test: on the small date the tops meet, so if they do not, it is the large date. It is a comparison, so it is much easier with a second coin than from memory.

What the four blank-mint-mark coins are worth

None of them carries a premium in circulated condition. For the year NGC's guide prints $0.05 in every worn grade from Good to AU58, the lowest figure it goes to, and the same $0.05 for both zinc varieties; that row last changed on 14 August 2023. For the small date bronze it prints no circulated figure at all, because its table starts at MS64. And $0.05 is what a collector pays a dealer for one coin, never an offer for yours.

The rows below are mint state grades, the ones for a coin that was never spent, and red means it kept its original copper color.

All of those rows last changed on 16 July 2019.

The small date bronze is the one collectors chase. Jaime Hernandez writes for PCGS that it is "one of the most difficult memorial cents to find in high grade condition. They are scarce even in MS64 and MS65 grades... In 2007, I searched many rolls and bags of this date and the nicest examples I ever found were very low end MS64 examples." PCGS records one at MS67+ selling for $9,988 through Heritage Auctions on 27 February 2014.

A small date bronze that has been spent is still a one-cent coin.

The famous 1982 penny is a Denver coin

The coin behind most of the 1982 videos is the 1982-D small date struck on a leftover bronze blank. NGC's own entry is blunt about what it is: "This combination of Small Date obverse hub and bronze planchet was not produced intentionally at the Denver Mint. It is a mint error that resulted when a leftover bronze planchet found its way to a coin press, and examples are exceedingly rare."

A Minnesota collector found the first one in November 2016, sorting cents by weight. Ken Potter authenticated it, NGC certified it AU 58 brown as the discovery coin, a grade for a coin with barely any wear on it, and Stack's Bowers Galleries sold it at the August 2017 ANA Rarities Night as lot 2031 for $18,800 total, which the lot record breaks down as $16,000 hammer plus a 17.5% buyer's premium. A second example, also graded AU58 brown by NGC, surfaced in early 2019 and brought $10,800 through Heritage Auctions in April of that year.

Three things have to be true at once for a coin to be that one: a D under the date, the small date, and a weight around 3.1 grams. CoinWeek's summary of what dealers are actually handed is that it is "typically a copper-plated zinc small-date cent (common), not a small date (oops), or that it doesn't even contain a D mintmark". A coin with no mint mark cannot be this error, whatever it weighs.

If yours does have the D, the small date and the weight, it goes in a holder and into the hands of a grading service or an error dealer who will put it on their own scale. Two examples are documented, the discovery coin and the one that surfaced in 2019, and nothing about a third gets settled from a photograph.

Not every blank 1982 cent came from Philadelphia

PCGS puts it directly: "The 1982 cents with no mint marks were struck at Philadelphia, San Francisco, and West Point... it is impossible to differentiate where 1982 cents with no mint marks originated from." David Lange adds the San Francisco number: 1,587,245 zinc cents struck for general circulation that year, carrying no mint mark, like West Point's. The 10,712,525,000 figure reported under Philadelphia for 1982 covers all of it, and no source splits it by date size or metal. All three buildings made the same coins to the same recipe, so the figures above apply whichever one struck yours.

The S mint mark does exist on a 1982 cent, on the 3,857,479 struck as proofs, the specially made coins sold to collectors in sets. Those were never in change.

Three things people get wrong about 1982

People are told that any 1982 cent weighing 3.1 grams is rare. Bronze was the ordinary metal for a good part of the year: Philadelphia struck bronze cents with both date sizes, and Denver struck bronze large date cents right up to its conversion day. The weight only makes a coin unusual on a 1982-D small date.

The first zinc cents are often dated to October. That date, 21 October 1982, is the day Denver switched: bronze in the morning, an hour's stop to clear the bronze coins and blanks out of the building, zinc after that. Lange dates the first zinc strikes to 7 January 1982 at West Point, with Philadelphia following soon after, and the first small date coins to 3 September. CoinWeek's 2021 guide to the year says October, which is where the confusion comes from.

The third is that a 1982-D small date bronze cent does not exist. That was true of the coins the Mint meant to issue, and NGC's own series overview still says "There is no 1982-D Small Date Bronze variety", as did Lange's 2005 article. The discovery coin certified in February 2017 made that sentence out of date, which is worth knowing if somebody quotes it at you.

We sell Buck, which you should put on the scale along with everything else here: it reads both sides of one coin from photographs, on iPhone and Android, and names the type, with a price guide's range for that type where one exists. It cannot weigh your cent, it holds no figure for a single year, and no photograph settles a grade, so on 1982 the measurement that actually separates the coins stays with you and a kitchen scale (what it costs).

Other years, and why Philadelphia's cents were left blank in the first place, are in the guide to pennies with no mint mark. What separates a mint error from damage is worth a read before you weigh anything.

David Lange's NGC article on the transitional cents of 1982 does most of the work on this page: the composition change and all three dates come from it. The rest: NGC VarietyPlus and NGC's Coin Explorer price guide for the varieties and the figures, the Stack's Bowers lot record for the 2017 sale of the discovery coin, CoinWeek's couch-cushion piece for the weight tolerance and the date-size test, CoinWeek's guide to the year for the proof mintage, CoinWeek's "Five More Rare Modern Coins" for the 2019 second example, and PCGS CoinFacts for the Philadelphia mintage, the three mints behind the blank cents, and the small date bronze in high grade. All read on 21 September 2026.