Whether a burden to space in your wallet or a loyal companion rattling around your car cup holder, the penny is officially going extinct as of Jan. 1, 2026.
For those who still use cash in this advanced era of technology, sorry for your loss. And for those who keep their money in card holders or Apple Wallet, you probably won’t notice a difference.
The reason behind this tragedy? Each penny costs about four cents to make. The U.S. Mint has been paying excessive prices to manufacture a coin worth almost nothing.
“I will be more than okay because it costs more to produce a penny than it’s worth,” Ben Serfaty ’26 said. “We already have billions in currency and no one even really uses change anyway.”
If you find yourself in possession of a penny, treat that little guy with respect. Put it somewhere special – a jar, maybe a frame. Now, you’ll own history. Students even have ideas about how the remaining pennies want to be treated.
“They’d want to be on a shelf,” Felix Mermagen ’27 said. “They would say, ‘give us more attention.’”
Despite this new empathetic understanding of penny emotions, not everyone plans on becoming a collector.
“Im not planning on hoarding pennies,” Julian Gravelle ’26 said.
There’s no need to panic, as these won’t be the last pennies we see.
According to the Treasury, there are an estimated 114 billion pennies currently in circulation. They’ll naturally disappear over the next several years as they get lost in couches, forgotten in piggy banks or drowned in washing machines.
Without pennies, businesses plan to round cash transactions to the nearest nickel. A small change, but some students fear businesses might use it to silently raise prices.
“Some people do check everything, so [businesses] will easily get called out if they’re [rounding up],” Mermagen said.
Meanwhile, digital transactions will be unaffected.
Even though no new pennies will be made after 2025, the ones already out there are still official government approved money.
To whom this may concern, the Mint will still make fancy collector versions for anyone out there who takes coin collecting seriously. And yes, pennies are still legal tender, but no, you may not pay your student loans entirely in pennies.
