Quarter with no mint mark: what the blank space means, 1932 to 1979

A quarter with a blank space where the mint mark goes came from Philadelphia in all but a handful of the years it was made, and worn it is worth 25 cents if it is dated 1965 or later, or about $12.50 of silver if it is dated 1964 or earlier. The US Mint says a circulating coin carries a P, a D, or "no mint mark (which signifies Philadelphia as the production facility)", and that the habit of leaving Philadelphia's coins unmarked "continued even after the first branches were established" in 1838. On quarters that habit lasted until 1980, the first year a quarter carries a P, so every Philadelphia quarter dated 1979 or earlier is blank, and there are billions of them.

The date is what decides the rest. A quarter dated 1964 or earlier is 90% silver and worth its metal: NGC's price guide had a worn common date at $12.50 on 21 September 2026, against $12.04 of silver in the coin, and that figure rises and falls with the silver price. A quarter dated 1965 or later is copper and nickel bonded over a copper core, and a worn one is worth face value. CoinWeek puts it flatly: "worn Washington Quarters carry no numismatic premium."

Where the mint mark sits, when there is one

It moved, which is why people look in the wrong place. On the silver quarters the letter is on the back, below the crossed ends of the olive branches and above the ER of QUARTER, so a blank spot there is what you are checking. From 1968 the letter is on the front, to the right of Washington's portrait: the Mint moved it there when mint marks came back, and CoinWeek's profile of a 1972-D puts the D in exactly that spot. A quarter dated 1968 through 1979 with nothing to the right of the portrait came from Philadelphia, with one qualification for the last four years, in the next section. Where mint marks are on US coins covers the other denominations.

West Point left quarters blank too

Philadelphia is not quite the only answer for the last few years of the run. The US Mint's own page on the West Point facility records that in 1976 it "produces Bicentennial quarters", and West Point put no letter on them. Wikipedia's account of the series goes further, saying quarters were struck at West Point from 1977 to 1979 as well, "but they bore no mint mark", with no production figure attached; the Mint's page does not mention those three years at all. So for 1976 through 1979 the empty spot covers two buildings, and the coin itself will not tell you which. Nothing about the money turns on it: a worn quarter is 25 cents whichever press it came off, and with no West Point figure published anywhere, nobody can say how the years divide up.

Three years when no circulating US coin had a mint mark at all

The Coinage Act of 1965, in the Mint's summary, "eliminated mint marks to discourage collecting while the Mint worked to meet the country's coinage needs. So, no mint marks appeared on circulating coins from 1965 to 1967." Every quarter dated 1965, 1966 or 1967 is blank whether it came from Philadelphia, Denver or San Francisco, and no one can now say which.

That is why those three rows in the table below carry one figure for all mints. Two of them have pages of their own: the 1965 quarter and the 1967 quarter.

Year by year, 1932 to 1979

Production figures are PCGS CoinFacts, cross-read against NGC Coin Explorer, which publishes a figure for 39 of these dates and agrees on every one of them. Two rows are marked Philadelphia because unmarked coins from elsewhere belong in them as well: San Francisco's 1964-dated quarters, and whatever West Point struck for the Bicentennial. The same question hangs over 1977, 1978 and 1979, and no figure has been published either way. The worn column is the silver in the coin for the silver dates and face value for the clad ones. The $12.50 is NGC's price guide, updated on 21 September 2026, and it moves with the silver price. NGC does publish a retail figure for the clad dates, $0.30 (last changed in March 2022) and $0.50 for the Bicentennial (June 2025); retail is what a dealer asks for a single coin over a counter, not what anyone hands you for a jar. No quarters were struck in 1933, and none is dated 1975, because the coins made that year already carried the 1776-1976 double date. What the Bicentennial quarter is worth covers that one on its own; for the silver question generally there is which US coins are silver.

1964: the last silver quarter, and the frozen date

This is the other date where a blank space does not pin the coin to Philadelphia. There was a coin shortage, Congress froze the date, and NGC says the 560,390,585 figure "represents three years of coinage". Philadelphia's own output got split between 1964 and 1965, and the San Francisco Assay Office struck over 15 million 1964-dated quarters in 1965 and another 4.6 million in early 1966, none of them marked. So a blank 1964 quarter might be from San Francisco, and nothing on the coin can tell you which.

It is also the last quarter made of 90% silver. The Coinage Act was enacted on 23 July 1965 and took silver out of the dime and the quarter; clad production started on 23 August. Silver pieces kept the 1964 date while the new ones were dated 1965 and later.

NGC lists five catalogued die varieties for 1964: four doubled die reverses, meaning the doubling sits on the back, FS-801 through FS-804, and the Type B reverse, FS-901. A doubled die is a die that picked up the design twice a fraction out of line and then stamped that double image onto every coin it made. On FS-801, NGC says "strong doubling is seen on QUARTER DOLLAR and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA". The Type B came from a retired proof die, a die made for the polished collector coins and then used for ordinary ones, and NGC's tell is that the "letters ES in STATES are clearly separated". None of the five has a documented auction sale in the sources behind this page.

On the ordinary ones, PCGS's David Hall is blunt: "The mintage of both 1964 issues were enormous, but the coins are not that common in Gem condition." Gem means a coin that never circulated and came off the press close to perfect, which is where the money in this series sits.

1966: eight hundred million coins, and one variety

821,101,500 quarters are dated 1966, out of every facility together, and not one of them says which one made it. PCGS's Jaime Hernandez calls the coin "very common, especially since over 800 million of them were struck", adding that "in MS67 condition it is scarce with less than a hundred examples graded by PCGS". MS67 is a number near the top of the 70-point scale those coins are graded on.

There is exactly one 1966 quarter variety in NGC's catalog, the doubled die reverse FS-801, and NGC describes it as obvious for once: "extremely strong doubling is seen on UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, E PLURIBUS UNUM and QUARTER DOLLAR." A separate 1966 quarter exists in the Special Mint Sets sold that year; PCGS puts that one at 2,200,000 struck and NGC at 2,261,583.

The highest 1966 sale PCGS reports is $21,000 for an MS68+ at Heritage on 7 May 2023.

1974: a huge year with nothing catalogued

Philadelphia struck 801,456,000, Denver another 353,160,300 with a D on them, and NGC's variety catalog has no 1974 quarter in it at all. Hernandez writes for PCGS: "The 1974-P Washington Quarter has a high mintage... Examples up to MS66 condition can be found effortlessly. In MS67 it's a different story." PCGS reports $2,115 for an MS67+ at Legend Rare Coin Auctions on 27 August 2020.

CoinWeek's Joshua McMorrow-Hernandez, writing in 2022, lists "1974 and 1977 quarters that were accidentally struck on 40% silver-clad planchets" among the notable errors of the decade. A planchet is the blank disc a coin is struck from. No auction record for a 1974 example turned up in any source used here, so treat it as a thing a specialist has reported and not as a price.

1979: the last blank one

Philadelphia struck 515,708,000, and that is where the run ends: the P arrives on the 1980 quarter and never leaves again. Hernandez calls it "a very common issue" and says "MS67 examples are very scarce". PCGS reports $1,440 for an MS68 at Heritage on 28 August 2022.

NGC's catalog lists no variety for the ordinary 1979 coins made for circulation. The 1979 entries it does carry, Type 1 and Type 2, are proof coins struck at San Francisco and they have an S on them, so they are not what is in your hand.

Which years have a variety worth a loupe

NGC's VarietyPlus catalog is the list most collectors work from, and for Philadelphia quarters it covers 1932, 1934 through 1939, 1941 through 1947, 1950, 1951, 1956 through 1966 and 1971. The 1934 entries include three strengths of the motto, catalogued as Light, Medium and Heavy. From 1956 to 1964 every year carries a Type B reverse. Nothing at all is listed for 1940, 1948, 1949, 1952 through 1955, 1967, 1968 through 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1977, 1978 or 1979.

Absence from that catalog is not proof that nobody ever reported a minor die difference somewhere. It does mean there is no named, priced, collectable variety to hunt in those years, which is the question people are usually asking. What turns up instead, by the handful, is machine doubling: a low ledge along the side of the letters, made after the coin was struck, worth nothing extra. How to tell an error from damage has the difference.

The four-figure prices all sit at the top of the grading scale

Collectors grade a coin from worn out to exactly as it left the press, and the sales that make headlines are all at the far end of that. PCGS reports $43,200 for a 1948 quarter graded MS68+ at Stack's Bowers in March 2021, $40,250 for a 1932 at MS67 at Heritage in April 2012, and $32,400 for a 1947 at MS68, also Stack's Bowers in March 2021. Those are the same dates sitting in the table above at $12.50 worn.

A coin at that end of the scale has never been in a pocket, and forty years in a coffee can does not produce one. Coin grading in plain terms explains the numbers, and a coin that might actually be at that end of the scale is weighed, measured and examined by a person: a grading service, or a dealer across a counter. Never from a photograph.

Buck is ours, so weigh this accordingly: point it at one coin at a time, front and back, on an iPhone or an Android phone, and it will name the type you are holding and show that type's price range where a guide publishes one. Its index is built by type, so a Type B reverse and a plain 1961 quarter are one entry to it, and the grade that decides every four-figure price on this page is the one thing it cannot read off a picture; what it costs is on its own page.

Where the table comes from, and the rest of it: PCGS CoinFacts for the production figures, the auction records and the Hernandez and Hall comments, cross-read against NGC Coin Explorer, which also gives the specifications and the worn price rows; NGC VarietyPlus for which years carry a catalogued variety; the United States Mint's own pages on mint marks and on West Point; CoinWeek's history of the clad Washington quarter for the mint mark positions and the 1965 changeover dates, and its profile of a 1972-D for where the letter sits on the front; and Wikipedia's article on the Washington quarter for the unmarked West Point strikes of 1977 to 1979. Everything was read on 21 September 2026.