Nickel with no mint mark: where the letter should be, and what yours is worth

A nickel with no mint mark was struck in Philadelphia, unless it is dated 1965, 1966 or 1967, when no US mint marked anything at all; either way a worn one is worth five cents. The letter is a factory stamp and nothing more: in the US Mint's own words, no mint mark "signifies Philadelphia as the production facility", a habit that began when Philadelphia was the only mint in the country and "continued even after the first branches were established". On a Jefferson nickel the letter, where there is one, sits on the back of the coin to the right of Monticello through 1964, and on the front under the date from 1968. A bare spot in either place is the ordinary coin for that year, and tens of millions were made in most years.

There is one stretch where the bare spot does carry information. From late 1942 through 1945 the Mint took the nickel out of the five-cent piece, put 35% silver in, and marked those coins with a large letter over the dome of Monticello, Philadelphia included. So the Philadelphia coins of 1943, 1944 and 1945 all carry a big P. Only 1942 is split: 49,789,000 copper-nickel coins with no mint mark, then 57,873,000 silver ones with the P above the dome.

Where the letter sits, and when it moved

Through 1964 it is on the back, beside Monticello. NGC: "Mintmarks appeared to the right of Monticello through 1964, when their use was suspended due to a nationwide coin shortage." Denver used a small D there and San Francisco a small S. Philadelphia used nothing.

For 1965, 1966 and 1967 there is no letter on any circulating US coin from any mint. The Mint's summary: "The Coinage Act of 1965 eliminated mint marks to discourage collecting while the Mint worked to meet the country's coinage needs." A blank nickel of those three dates says nothing at all about where it was made. The 1964 date was frozen and struck into 1965 as well, so the year on the coin is not always the year it left the press.

From 1968 the letter moved to the front. The Mint's press release of January 4, 1968 ordered "all mint marks be placed on the obverse (face) of the coins", with the nickel's mark "to the right of the portraits"; NGC locates it beneath the date, "to the right of Jefferson's peruke", meaning his wig. Philadelphia still marked nothing, so every Philadelphia nickel from 1968 to 1979 is blank too. CoinWeek dates the change: "In 1980, the 'P' mint mark returned to the nickel after a 34-year absence." Philadelphia has marked its nickels ever since, so a nickel dated 1980 or later with nothing under the date is worth a second look. Where to look for a mint mark covers the other denominations.

San Francisco is the odd one. The Mint says it "later produced 'S' nickels from 1968-1970" for circulation, and NGC adds that "beginning in 1971 and continuing to the present day, San Francisco has struck only proof examples for collectors", meaning coins struck for collectors rather than for change.

The four years before 1980 when Philadelphia marked its nickels

The wartime coins are 56% copper, 35% silver and 9% manganese. NGC dates the change from the order that removed nickel from the coin "effective October 8, 1942", running "through the end of 1945", and notes that this was when "the letter P was used as a mintmark for the first time on a U. S. coin". The Mint's page says the mark moved "from the right of Monticello to above the dome to indicate the new metal composition", and that after the war "the Mint no longer used Philadelphia's 'P'".

These are not scarce. Philadelphia alone struck 271,165,000 of them in 1943 and about 119 million in each of 1944 and 1945. What they have is silver, and the price guides move with the metal: PCGS showed a flat $6 floor for circulated war nickels on 21 September 2026, while NGC's circulated figures for the same coins were last changed between 2020 and 2024 and sit at $1.25 in Good and $1.80 in Very Fine, under an older silver price. Uncirculated ones, meaning coins that were never spent, go further, and those are graded coins: the 1945-P is $40 at MS66 and $200 at MS67 on the PCGS guide, read the same day.

They also weigh the same as an ordinary nickel, 5.00 grams, so a scale will not find one for you. The large letter over the dome is the whole test.

Every year people search for

Worn figures are NGC Price Guide rows running from Good to AU58, that is from well worn to barely circulated, last changed between 2020 and 2023. MS65 is a high uncirculated grade, and those figures are the PCGS price guide, read on 21 September 2026. Both are retail asking prices for a coin a dealer would stock, not what anyone pays you. Four of the totals struck come from PCGS because NGC prints none for those years (1971, 1974, 1977 and 1978). Two dates have sources that disagree: NGC counts 120,615,000 coins struck for circulation in 1939 where PCGS prints 120,627,535, a gap of exactly that year's 12,535 proofs, and on 1963 the two differ by 8,000 coins with no explanation to offer. Both services also split 1939 by reverse design, so the PCGS value above is its Reverse of 1938 listing while the NGC worn figures come from NGC's older undivided 1939 row. The dates with anything behind them beyond the ordinary coin are 1939, 1942, 1947, 1964 and 1971, further down.

What Full Steps means, and when it matters

Look at the base of Monticello on the back of the coin. The steps there are the last detail to fill in when the coin is struck, and on most older Jefferson nickels they come out mushy, so collectors pay for the ones that came out sharp. PCGS defines Full Steps as the "term applied to a Jefferson five-cent example when at least 5 steps of Monticello are present", and NGC uses two labels on Jefferson nickels only, 5FS and 6FS, for five and six complete steps. NGC explains why the run is like that: "Until the late 1980s, when lowering of this coin's relief resulted in consistently sharp strikes, most Jefferson Nickels were seldom found with all details distinct."

It only applies to uncirculated coins. Wear takes the steps off first, so a nickel from a pocket cannot qualify, whatever its date. On a coin that does qualify the gap is large: the 1946 is $65 in MS66 on the PCGS guide and $600 in the same grade with Full Steps, a difference the 1946 page goes into.

The dates with something real behind them

1939 has the Doubled Monticello, a doubled die on the back of the coin that PCGS lists as its own coin. It is the one 1939 no-mint-mark nickel worth real money worn: $10 in Good, $90 at VF20, $165 at AU50 and $1,600 at MS65 on the PCGS guide of 21 September 2026, with a PCGS auction record of $4,600 for an MS67 at Bowers & Merena on 22 September 2002. We have no sourced description of exactly where the doubling shows, so this is a coin to put in front of a person rather than judge from a photograph.

1942 has two doubled die obverse varieties on the copper-nickel coin, both catalogued by NGC, and one transitional error: a Type One nickel, no P over the dome, struck on the silver wartime alloy. PCGS records the one certified example, graded Good 6, selling for $9,988 with Heritage on 10 August 2016.

1947 is one of the dates the counterfeiter Francis Leroy Henning used in the 1950s, along with 1939, 1944, 1946 and 1953. His pieces all look circulated and many weigh about 5.40 grams against the proper 5.00; the 1946 page carries the rest of the diagnostics.

1964 has the specimen strikes, sometimes called SMS nickels. NGC describes them as a "curious issue" that "first surfaced in the early 1990s", with a "muted, satiny finish and exceptionally strong strikes", and says plainly that they are "too rare to be considered a regular part of the Jefferson series". That is a grading service's call, not something to settle at home.

1971 has the No S, which people find in search results and then look for in their change. It is a proof coin from a 1971 proof set, struck at San Francisco from a die that never got its letter, and PCGS calls it "the only coin in the entire Jefferson Nickel series that has been struck without containing the intended mint mark". NGC reports that "the Mint released a statement estimating that a maximum of 1,655 were released, but to date, NGC has only graded around 100". A mirror-surfaced coin that came in a sealed proof set is a candidate. An ordinary 1971 nickel from a coin jar is one of the 106,884,000 Philadelphia struck.

Any of these is a trip to a grading service or a dealer's counter, because every one of them hangs on details that a photograph flattens. Telling an error from damage is the first filter, and coin grading in plain terms explains the numbers the prices above are attached to.

Buck is ours and we sell it, so weigh this accordingly: it names the coin type from photographs of the two sides, one coin per shot, on iPhone and Android, and shows that type's price range where a guide carries one. On this page's coin it gets as far as "Jefferson nickel" and stops, because its index keys to the type and holds no per-year figure, so it cannot pick a 1939 Doubled Monticello out of the ordinary 1939s, and it can neither count the steps on Monticello nor judge the grade that decides nearly every figure in the table above (what it costs).

Most of this page comes from NGC's Coin Explorer: the series notes, the mintages and every worn price row for Jefferson nickels, plus NGC VarietyPlus for the 1942 doubled dies. The uncirculated figures, the Full Steps definition, the Doubled Monticello prices and the two auction records are PCGS CoinFacts, the PCGS price guide and PCGS Lingo, all read on 21 September 2026. The mint mark rules are the United States Mint's own, from its page on mint marks, its press release of January 4, 1968 restoring them and its coin specifications table, and CoinWeek supplied the five mint mark positions of the series and the Henning counterfeits.