Did they stop making pennies?

Cost. By the mid-2020s it cost roughly 3.7 cents to manufacture and distribute a one-cent coin — nearly four times its face value. In February 2025 the Treasury was directed to end production, and after winding down blanks and running final collector strikes, the last circulating pennies came off the presses in November 2025.

In practice, cash transactions increasingly round to the nearest nickel, similar to what Canada did after retiring its own penny in 2012. Electronic payments are unaffected and still settle to the exact cent.

Not automatically. A coin's value comes from rarity and condition, and the discontinuation changed neither: the Mint made hundreds of billions of pennies over the decades, and common dates remain common. Your 1985 or 2010 penny is still worth one cent.

What the news does do is push people to look at their change for the first time — and that is when the genuinely valuable ones surface. Wheat pennies (1909–1958), key dates like the 1909-S VDB and 1914-D, and famous errors like the 1955 doubled die were worth real money before the announcement and still are. Pre-1982 cents also contain about 2–3 cents of copper, though melting them down is illegal — any premium there runs through collectors, not scrap.