Silver melt value calculator: what the silver in your coins is worth today

Melt value is what the metal in a coin is worth, and nothing else. You take the coin's weight, multiply by the share of that weight which is silver, and multiply again by today's silver price. For American coins both of the first two numbers are fixed by law, so the only thing that moves is the price. Pick your coins below and the calculator does the multiplying.

How the math works

Weight times fineness gives the grams of pure silver, and those grams times the silver price per gram give the melt value. Fineness is the share of the coin that is actually silver: 0.900 means ninety parts silver in a hundred. Silver is quoted per troy ounce, which is 31.1035 grams, so the price per gram is the ounce price divided by that.

A 1964 quarter weighs 6.25 grams and is 0.900 fine, which works out at 5.625 grams of silver, the 0.1808 troy ounces NGC lists. Two of those is a bit over a third of an ounce, and forty of them is about seven and a quarter ounces. That is the whole of the arithmetic. The date, the mint mark and the condition play no part in it.

One caveat on the weight: it is the weight the coin was struck at, and a coin that spent forty years in circulation is slightly lighter than one that did not.

Which US coins are silver, and what they hold

The first three denominations were silver long before 1873. The table starts there because that is the year they took the weights in it: the Mint Act of 1873 added a little mass to the dime, the quarter and the half dollar to bring them in line with fractions of the French five-franc piece. Earlier standards moved about. A Seated Liberty dime weighed 2.67 grams until 1853 and 2.49 grams after it, and a Draped Bust dime was 89.24% silver, a shade under ninety. So an early coin needs weighing before any of this arithmetic applies.

The half dollar, the quarter and the dime come straight from the statute book. The Coinage Act of 1873 set the standard for silver coins so that "of one thousand parts by weight nine hundred shall be of pure metal", put the half dollar at "twelve grams (grammes) and one-half of a gram", and made the quarter and the dime one half and one fifth of that. Those are the same figures NGC lists for a quarter struck in 1964.

The silver dollar comes down a different line. The 1873 Act discontinued it, and the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 brought it back at the old 1837 standard of 412.5 grains at ninety percent, which is the 26.73 grams every Morgan and Peace dollar was struck at.

The Coinage Act of 1965 is where all of it ends. It made the quarter and the dime copper-nickel clad at 5.67 and 2.268 grams, and kept silver in the half dollar at a lower rate: a coin weighing 11.5 grams and containing "4.6 grams of silver and 6.9 grams of copper". Those halves ran to 1970, and the 1970-D was struck only for the sets of new coins sold to collectors that year, because the Mint was expecting the law to change again. It did, on the last day of that year: the bill taking the remaining silver out of the half dollar was signed on 31 December 1970. From 1971 the half is copper-nickel clad and weighs 11.34 grams.

The nickel is the odd one out. Nickel metal was wanted for armor plating, so from 8 October 1942 to the end of 1945 the five-cent piece was struck in an alloy of 56% copper, 35% silver and 9% manganese, still weighing 5 grams. Because the Mint meant to pull them back in later, these coins carry a large mint mark over the dome of Monticello, and one of the three letters used is a P, which had never been struck on any US coin before. That big letter above the dome is how you spot one in a jar of ordinary nickels.

Coins like these, common dates with no collector premium, are what the trade calls junk silver, and they change hands purely for the metal. Every denomination and its dates are set out in which US coins are silver, and if the date has worn away there are five tests you can do at a kitchen table.

Why a buyer pays less than this

Melt is a ceiling, not an offer. Whoever buys your silver has to weigh and sort it, hold it while the price does whatever it does, ship it and eventually refine or resell it, and their bid has to cover all of that before it pays them anything. So dealers buy under melt and sell over it, with the gap widest on a few coins handed across a counter and narrowest on a large lot. Call more than one buyer before you take the first number. Ask whether the offer is a percentage of spot, the market price silver is trading at, because that is usually how the number is built.

When the coin is worth more than its silver

Two things lift a coin above its metal, and scarcity comes before condition. The melt figure is the floor under a common silver coin and the wrong number entirely for a scarce one: a Morgan dollar holds about 24 grams of fine silver whatever its date, roughly three quarters of a troy ounce, and what a Morgan is actually worth depends on the year, the mint mark and how much wear it carries. A 1916-D Mercury dime holds the same 2.25 grams as every other silver dime and is worth many times that whatever its wear.

So the order of work is: read the date and the mint mark, look up whether that combination is common, and only fall back on the melt figure once you know it is. Anything that looks like it could be worth real money should be weighed and examined by somebody holding it, because that is also how counterfeits get caught.

Grade is the worn-to-as-struck scale a coin is ranked on, and on a scarce coin it decides most of the price. No photograph can settle it. Buck reads a coin or a note from a photo and names it: on iPhone from iOS 17, on Android from 8.0, with no web version. The worth it puts on the type is an estimate, a range wherever the price guide carries one, and nobody is offering to buy at it. Coins go through one at a time, front face then back, and the session totals them as it goes.

What this calculator does, and what it cannot

It multiplies, and that is all it does. It cannot grade your coin or tell a genuine one from a good copy, and it has no idea whether your date is a scarce one.

The list holds the six American coins in the table above and the common European silver that turns up in a drawer: the Italian 500 and 1000 lire, the 5 Deutsche Mark, the French Hercules and Sower pieces, and British silver from before 1920 and from 1920 to 1946. Pick either British row and it asks you for a weight, because those series were struck in several sizes. Pick "Another coin" and you type the weight and the fineness yourself.

The arithmetic runs on this page, in your browser: the counts you type are not sent to us and not stored anywhere. The one number that does come from outside is the silver price, which is shown with the date it was read and where it came from. Spot moves all day, so treat any figure here as a snapshot rather than a quote.

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What this page is based on: the texts of the Coinage Act of 1873 and the Coinage Act of 1965 as published by the US Government Publishing Office; NGC's Coin Explorer entries for the 1964 Washington quarter, the Jefferson five cents and the 1970-D Kennedy half dollar; and Wikipedia's entries for the dime, the Jefferson nickel, the Kennedy half dollar, the Morgan dollar and the Peace dollar. All read 21 September 2026.