Are old coins worth money?

The short answer

Age on its own is worth nothing: a two-thousand-year-old Roman bronze can be bought for pocket money, while a cent from 1909 sells for four figures. What sets the price is how many survive and how many people collect them, and a coin struck in the hundreds of millions is common however old it is.

Survivors rather than years

Coins are made in enormous numbers and most of them outlive the people who spent them. What decides scarcity is how many were struck, how many were melted afterwards and how many were kept, and none of those follow from the date. Roman coins survive by the hundreds of thousands because they were buried in hoards; a 1933 double eagle survives in single figures because the rest were recalled and melted.

This is also why a series tells you more than a century does. Within one design struck for fifty years, a handful of year-and-mint combinations were struck in small numbers, and those are the coins worth money. The rest look identical and are not.

What an old coin often has

Metal. Coins made before the middle of the twentieth century were often struck in silver or gold because the metal was the money, and that gives them a floor no modern circulating coin has. A worn Victorian shilling and a worn silver quarter are both worth their silver on any day of the week.

That floor is worth checking first, because it is the part of the answer that can be calculated rather than judged. The melt value pages here give it for every coin in the catalogue, sorted so the richest coins come first.

What does add value

A low mintage for that year and mint, which you check by reading the date and the mint mark. An unworn surface, which is scarce on any coin old enough to have circulated. And a die variety or an error, which is a coin that left the mint different from its siblings.

All three are read off the coin rather than deduced from its age, and they stack: an unworn example of a low-mintage date is where the large prices in a common series are. How much is my coin worth sets out the order to check them in.

Sorting an inherited box

Sort by metal before you sort by date. Pull out anything silver or gold using the test in how can I tell if a coin is silver, because that pile has a floor under it and the rest does not. Then check dates and mint marks in the remainder against the coin value catalogue.

Do not clean anything, and do not sort by how good a coin looks. The two mistakes cost the same accumulation twice: once when the good coins are polished, and again when they are sold as scrap because nobody read the dates.