They Are Still Out There,Silver Nickels That Is.
BLUEJAYWAY
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Cashed out at the local casino today. What at first I thought was a "black beauty" was a 1945-P silver nickel. Not a monumental find, but none the less it's find still brings out the collector in you.
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Yeah, every once in a rare while I still get one of those. I too enjoy how excited I still get about this.
Silver at face value is always cool 😎
Mr_Spud
I like to get the 38 & 39 dates too
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The warnickel I got was so black that's how I was fooled. A few years ago I got another one in change at the same casino and a silver quarter. Only times I ever won at a casino.😀
Wouldn't that be an interesting marketing gimmick if they added some on purpose to keep people coming back?
They do not need gimmicks. People gladly feed the machines.
Cool find, how did the casino do for you?
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I usually find 1 in a box from the Credit union. Yea, they are rather neat. At spot they are valued at $3.17 per War nickel.
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If current trends persist (and they probably will) fewer than 10% of the war nickels will survive in ten years. There's a strong possibility that nicer specimens won't be removed from future melts so almost all the survivors will be low grade dogs. This merely assumes silver prices tend to reflect the continuing scarcity of the metal relative consumption. A lot are already gone. Price will erase the premium on the most common dates even in AU.
These coins don't get no respect. There are interesting varieties all through the series with 3 DDR's '45-P's and I believe a couple RPM's. People seem to forget these coins are only common in low grade so when they're gone the varieties become scarce even in low grade. I seriously doubt the refineries spend much time sorting such coins.
These are some very specific assertions based on an assumption that I have always understood to be incorrect.
It has been a long-held belief that not many war nickels actually get melted due to a very messy alloy that is prohibitively difficult and/or expensive to refine into pure silver.
Even 90%, for example, can be easily refined, or mixed with pure silver to bring it up to Sterling fineness. But the war nickel alloy has no other use that I am aware of and is difficult to turn into .999 silver.
I'd be very interested in any facts to the contrary.
I don't really know anything but my understanding is vast numbers were melted through the '60's and '70's to make electrical contacts. These would all be gone now tossed into trash and landfill. Two war nickels contain much more silver than a silver dime but trade at a significant discount making them an attractive alternative to other alloys.
They still trade at a massive discount and are remarkably unpopular that coin dealers avoid buying them by offering close to nothing for them. With over $3 with of silver in each one many shops might not even pay a dollar. Refineries are paying $2.30 right now. Low premiums have always resulted in mass melting so I'm assuming it's still true.
The same thing applies to the '65 - '70 40% kennedys. Dealers don't want them so pay very very little. These coins were certainly destroyed in 1980 and I assume they are now as well because of the steep discount. Being newer and more recently worth more than face value the attrition is probably lower.
A lot of coins have been destroyed to make up shortfall in production but even more because they have to melt what's available and they'll melt the highest discounts first as possible. You can't sell 35% or 40% but you can convert it into forms to sell at a premium even if that's silver eagles.
I'd wager nearly 75% of the war nickels are already gone and the '45-P will be slightly higher destruction than the average.
A dealer will pay about $140 to ship a bag worth nearly $10,000. That's hardly onerous cost. His costs are erven lower if he lives near a refiner and can haul enough to make it worth his effort, which can be nominal if he's going that way anyway. Coins simply flow toward the highest buyer and even though they're really cheap war nickels have few buyers.
Even nickel collectors aren't beating down the doors to get their 11-coin sets. Most collectors prefer Unc or high circ grades but these simply aren't hard to find until you hit MS-66. To say the market is anemic is an understatement but a lot of even most common varieties are really tough except in the grades being destroyed.
40% will also survive better because they always had their face value to protect against lower silver prices. 5c isn't enough to give much protection. They made a lot of 35 and 40% and they must be somewhere. I'm guessing that with no buyers other than melters we can guess where they are.
My understanding is that it's hard to get the manganese out of the coins and this is the cause of the low premiums. But these are fixed costs that don't go up with higher silver prices. This is why I'm expecting destruction of these coins to be so high in the next ten years; they'll be among the first to be converted to more saleable form. Perhaps few will go into good delivery bars but they'll go into other alloys freeing metal to make good delivery bars.
This makes sense. I read a few years ago that the silver war nickels actually had to go through the refining process twice because of their low silver fineness and the nature of the other metals that they are alloyed with.
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A fair amount of laminations on them exist.
Mainly visit the sports book. On occasion I put a few dollars in the machines. Lose. Then realize why I don't play them much.
In the early and mid 1960's I was actively pulling war nickels from rolls and mailing them to refiners. So were thousands of others. (Postage costs were much lower at the time.) I think overall survival is 10% or less, based on my experience and the following A.I. analysis:
There is strong evidence that the number of surviving war nickels may be far lower than the usual published ranges.
Let’s walk through where the coins could be, and why the “365 million survivors” estimate is almost certainly too high.
✅ 1. The “Survivor Problem”: Where Are They Physically?
If ~300–400 million war nickels survived:
They would appear in central bank vaults
They would appear in coin shops
They would move through bullion wholesalers
Rolls and bags would be readily available from estate accumulations
But none of these things are true.
Coin shops rarely stock them.
Bullion dealers prefer 90% silver, not 35%.
Online markets list shockingly few bags.
New large hoards do not appear in the 2000s–2020s.
Most collectors actively avoid storing them because they corrode, smell, and take up space.
If several hundred million still existed, these things would not all be true simultaneously.
This strongly suggests the real surviving population is far lower.
📉 2. Why Standard Survival Estimates Are Inflated
Numismatists tend to overestimate war nickel survivorship because:
They assume similar survival to 90% silver coins
— but war nickels circulated LONGER and had WORSE attrition.
They underestimate pre-1963 normal wear attrition
A coin with a soft alloy circulating 18 years with no collecting interest?
Huge destruction rate.
They assume melting was modest
Melting was large, repeated, and spread over decades.
They don't see the negative incentive to save them
Nobody wants a bag of stinky, dark, pitted coins that take up huge space.
The market avoids them, which is a hint:
If tens or hundreds of millions still existed, they would be flooding market channels because they have nowhere else to go.
Here’s a more realistic model:
▶️ Step 1 — Pre-1963 attrition
Soft alloy + high circulation = very high culling and wearout.
Estimated attrition: 35–45% lost by 1963.
For 869.9M minted, survivors ≈
869.9M × 0.60 = ~520M
869.9M × 0.55 = ~478M
▶️ Step 2 — Melting 1964–1980
The biggest melting occurred from 1964–1968 and especially 1979–1980.
Realistic estimate: 50–70% of the remaining coins melted
(refinery volume & bullion reports support this scale).
For 500M remaining:
If 50% melted → 250M left
If 60% melted → 200M left
If 70% melted → 150M left
▶️ Step 3 — 1980–2025 attrition (continuous)
These were not collected; bags kept getting melted whenever silver popped.
Estimated additional loss: 25–40%.
Starting from 200M survivors: 30% attrition → ~140M left
Starting from 150M survivors: 30% attrition → ~105M left
👉 More realistic modern survival range: 80–160 million coins
This range aligns with actual market availability, not theoretical estimates.
🧨 Why Survival Might Be Even Lower — Possibly Under 100 Million
Here are signs the real number is closer to 70–120 million:
✔ Very few bulk bags on market today
Compare to 90% silver: bags appear constantly.
War-nickel bags almost never appear in bulk.
✔ Coin shops actively avoid buying them
Most shops literally do not want them unless they have a refinery contract—another sign supply is not huge.
✔ No major hoards found since the 1980s
Large populations tend to reappear occasionally.
War nickels have not done so.
Conclusion:
The true surviving number could plausibly be as low as:
📉 60–120 million total survivors
(~7–14% of original mintage)
This would explain the market reality far better than the classic “300+ million survivors” claim.
The commonly quoted survival estimates for silver war nickels are almost certainly far too high.
After accounting for:
Extremely heavy pre-1963 circulation wear
Very large melt waves
Continuous melting cycles since 1960s
Negative incentives to save bulk quantities
The near-total absence of large bags in today’s market
The most realistic estimate is:
👉 60–120 million survivors, total
= only about 7–14% of original mintage
—not the 30–45% often quoted.
This explains why the coins feel “rare in bulk” even though they were minted in huge numbers.
Extremely heavy pre-1963 circulation wear
War nicks are kindda funny. Every other circulating coin that I've looked at closely will lay out on a nice bell curve when plotted for wear. Most are in or near a grade and the number higher tapers off to nothing as do the number lower. Some times this curve is very tight as with clad quarters where almost every 1968 is in VG with few better or worse and sometimes it's very broad with most coins in VG to Fine with numerous outliers better and worse like the 1919 British penny. Usually there's a well defined bell curve but not always and the exceptions can be hard to figure.
War nickels are a little strange because there are so many outliers at the high end for which I can at least partly account but there are a significant number at the low end which I can't explain. About 3 or 4% of the coins are in deplorable condition with extreme wear and often beaten up a little. These tend to be dated '43-P and '44-P but any date is possible. Based on the existence of these extremely worn coins it is believable that some of the war nickels wore out and were removed but it's very difficult to believe that with the average amount of wear so low for this series that many were withdrawn. You can look at coins like barber quarters and see large numbers of very heavily worn coins including a few that are nearly slick so it's logical to assume lots were worn out and melted. We have mint records to support this. But it's unlikely many war nicks were melted because they were worn, they were melted because they were war nickels.
A lot were lost in circulation and would have had a nearly 2% attrition rate up until the '60's but these weren't intentionally destroyed but rather met misadventure like falling through a hole in a pocket.
My 75% estimated attrition is mostly just a working number. It might not be reflective of reality. I tend to be overly conservative with these so if it's off much it's likely higher.
But however many are left it's a good bet they are going to be making a bee line to the furnaces in the next ten years because the world is set on a course to convert silver supplies to 999 and war nickels are among the least loved of all silver. Most will actually go into products that a little manganese is acceptable freeing up better silver for 999.
If this comes to pass in ten years a lot of varieties that never got much attention because they are common are going to be quite scarce because they haven't and have never been separated out and they'll be melted. If we destroyed every '50-D nickels above VF it would be a scarce coin and if we melt every war nickel variety in less than VF varieties will be scarce and this is the most probable outcome because people are unlikely to start loving war nickels. There won't be much separation so coins like XF '44-D and DDO 45-P are going to be very uncommon coins. Even a lot of the key date '43/ 2 will be melted and already have been but this one does often get separated.
AI can be quite right and remarkably wrong often at the same time. I'm impressed it says they stink. They are so dirty that you have to wash your hands frequently and they do have a bit of an odor but most old coins do. Their primary function might have been mostly just to remind citizens that the country was on a war footing every time they went shopping so for most practical purposes they have been obsolete since 1946 and have been treated accordingly.
I guess my point is simple. We want to keep as much 90% as we can because that is our heritage but we shouldn't just mindlessly melt everything else. Before we pack stuff up for the melters let's consider what we're losing forever before they're all gone.
Within the last 2 months, I liquidated ALL my war nickels and 40% along with a lot of random foreign coins and Franklin mint stuff, and sterling pieces. As long as the assay was over 80%, the refinery paid 95% of spot. Spot was based on either the price before the melt started or after, my choice before they started. No issue with manganese, or anything else.
They melt on site, and cast a block with the assay and weight stamped on it. They paid 95% cash up to $5K or check after that or for 5% I could have bought the block back.
It was not any "harder" to melt them, assay them, and pay out. The blocks go to a mega refinery, where it is converted to "pure" silver.
Maybe manganese was an issue at some point, but the local and mega refineries did not care. it all is removed and what they do with the copper, manganese and whatever else is in there appears not to be an issue.
While there is a lot of discussion on 90% versus 40% versus whatever else in US coinage, there is very little on random foreign junk silver in the US. That stuff is probably being melted like crazy at this time. All the random purities and trying to calculate how much silver there is, accounting for wear, holes, etc. it appears to be easy just to toss it in the melt pots, without a tear being shed.
The "junk" tends to go first. People hold onto the nice stuff or trade it but the junk gets melted.
I've never heard of anyone paying over 90% spot for war nickels and it's usually lower. I've always had to give them away.
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Not a big problem, according to A.I.:
Electrolytic Refining
Nickels are dissolved in nitric–sulfuric acid.
Copper and manganese go into solution.
Silver “slimes” settle at the bottom as a byproduct.
Silver slimes are melted into pure 999 fine silver bars.
Refineries optimized this in the 1960s and 1970s so yields were efficient.
Great thread! But a fun question: how many war nickels are still left in circulation? Or possible to be released in circulation when the grandkids open Pop Pop’s coin jars that he has been saving for the last 50 years?
Received a 1943-P war nickel in change at my favorite Pizza Parlor yesterday. It was almost as good as the Pizza.
For every practical purpose none have circulated since about 1972. Of course one can sit in a piggy bank for 50 years or could go from one to another. With such huge mintages it's possible there's one left in "circulation". Most of the old coins we see have been pulled out before and this goes ten times over for every silver coin. There is a slow trickle of coins back into circulation. This can even turn int a slow torrent during horrid economic times like 2008. Many households dissolved and all coins could get back into circulation. Half of all the silver quarters I found this century was between '08 and '10. (less than a dozen all together). Pre-1960 nickels tend to often be VF, XF or even AU while 1965 to '75 nickels are rarely seen above F. I doubt more than ~20% of surviving '38 - 1960 nickels are in circulation at any given time. War nickels are far lower. If there really are a little more than 200,000,000 as I suggest then probably fewer than 1% are in circulation.
I haven’t read all the responses above, but curious when people starting saying the coins were melted and others saying they might not have been, so I went and looked it up. This was one of the first hits, it’s from Numismatic News supposedly, so hopefully someone did something to verify, never sure though. But something interesting I found at:
https://www.numismaticnews.net/collecting-101/war-nickels-loophole-in-melting-ban
Mr_Spud
Fun fact: 20 war nickels = 1 peace dollar.
(At least that was true until 1963.)
Despite their heavy silver content these coins, like the '43 steel cent, were not well liked after the war, Some effort was made to remove the cents but I'm aware of no effort to remove the war nickels. I suspect many were kept is storage because when I started collecting in 1957 there were XF and AU coins. Arguing against this though is that today no date stands out as being particularly tough in high grade except the '44-D which simply didn't get saved over the years because people saved the lower mintage '43-D. Perhaps it's just that the '44-D did not sit in storage as much and most became worn.
With .0563 Ot silver in them and no ban on melting until 1964 it's not surprising that some were melted. They did contain more than 5c worth of silver as far back as 1952. It wasn't worth gathering them up to melt but if you already had them, why not? Unless the FED removed some the real attrition didn't start until the mid-'60's. By the middle of 1968 these had 13c worth of silver in them and were the only US silver coins legally melted. Even in those days I doubt there was any extensive illegal melting. Some 90% would have been melted by individuals and then sold in this form. There's probably nothing that can stop the rest of these being destroyed over the next decade. The world needs silver and these coins are so unloved most will find a way to the refineries. The scope of this problem is larger than some might realize. Even today some poor quality BU rolls will be getting tossed into the pot because they are common enough and there aren't always ready buyers. If silver prices come to reflect a scarcity then a lot of BU coins will be destroyed by the roll and individually. Even the exceedingly common '43-P could be a future scarcity. No matter what the silver price does the fate of most of these coins is fixed because the world needs their silver. The price will merely dictate the extent of the melting relative collector demand and inertia because many of them simply won't change hands over the next decade. If aunt Martha doesn't sell her silver nickels they are unlikely to be melted.
The '43-D might be a little underappreciated today. Any attrition combined with low mintage is going to make a coin tougher and more than one third of of war nickels are not in G or better condition mostly due to wear but there are lots of culls. Perhaps the '43-D only seems common because it can be found by the roll while the others can not. Over time the rolls will dissipate.
Interesting thread. Good posts - somewhat of a learning experience for me. I have two uncirculated war 5C rolls - a 42-S & 44-D. I know the ‘44 is somewhat tough & was told the ‘42 was also.
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Even a lot of BU rolls could end up in the pot. Better dates and nicer coins are certainly well protected now. I nice gemmy roll of the '44-D's could easily be worth $500 today to the right buyer but it has $130 worth of silver in it. Poorer quality rolls of things like the 1943 have no protection at all.
A lot of silver will trade hands over the next ten years because it's needed to create the future and if we don't plan ahead and check these coins for Gems and varieties they might be melted in haste.
War nickels now contain more than $4 worth of silver so even common BU rolls like the '43-D and '45-S are hitting the melting pot!
I've also seen that a very high percentage of war nickels are 1943-P's in XF and AU. This implies that large quantities of these were released to circulation as late as the mid-'50's: Perhaps as many as 50,000,000.
It's also common to see polished coins and if these were from the sets packaged for display and sold to the public at high prices it implies that huge percentages of these were being melted starting in the early '70's. The FED removed large numbers of coins in the mid to late-'50's because they were unpopular with the general public and these were all smelted. If you add all this together the number of surviving coins could be far lower than I've been estimating. Rather than only 75% being gone it could be as high as 85% already.
Because silver wears so poorly a lot of these coins are in deplorable condition. There are a few that are very nearly dateless. Only about a third of them can be described as G or better and these tend to be common date, of course.
With new smelting capacity coming on-line in the next few years these coins could become pretty hard to find things like a nice F 1942-S. Of course it won't be rare with nearly 10% of the mintage surviving but half of those will be cull or in less than G condition. This starts getting down to some pretty low numbers.
Even the '45-P (the subject of the thread) might have only four or five million pieces left in collectible condition. Smelting is being ramped up because they are planning to melt silver. Even if silver dropped to 1945 levels it is still silver and they are coming for it. It will happen because industry needs metal.
These cannot be melted in the normal manner due to the toxicity of the materials used. The silver can only be removed using chemical methods.
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War nickels are the only silver coin I would consider to still be “in circulation” in this country (meaning that they have a notable and consistent density in circulation). This is very likely largely due to the fact that they weigh the same as a standard nickel, meaning automatic coin counting/accepting machines will still accept them, whereas 90% is rejected by machines. In my experience they generally have a circulation density of approximately 0.05%, or one coin per 2,000 as of late 2025.
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intresting, my anecdotal observetion suports this as they are by far and really the only silver I get in change
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I don't think you're seeing 'circulation". Just as silver dimes and quarters find their way back into circulation sometimes, so too do the silver nickels. The difference is that nickels are harder to detect as being silver and fewer are involved in transactions allowing them to spend weeks in change until they are found.
My findings are based on a research group of approximately 200k coins in the form of bank roll boxes (the boxes business use to restock their change). The findings remained fairly consistent throughout the group. I was also able to gather data on the numbers of Buffalo and Liberty nickels still in circulation. Findings on both determined that neither type can be considered to be in active circulation to any notable extent. Buffalos averaged from 0.025% to 0.017% density. Libertys are excessively rare in circulation, at approximately 0.001% density, or one occurrence per 100k.
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I might also note that 0.05% is what I am considering the minimum for a nickel to be “in circulation”, as it means that a business purchasing a box of nickels can be reasonably certain that they are receiving at least one of the type in question.
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How long did it take you too go through that many nickels?
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Not to sharpshoot you, but the local refinery just melts them mixed in with sterling, foreign, 90%, etc.
I have probably pulled a couple dozen out of the till in my store since we opened 10 years ago. Not alot, but always a nice surprise. I need to find the envelope I have them in to get an exact count.
It's easy enough to show these aren't really in circulation. If they were circulating they'd be more heavily worn than the coins that were in circulation in 1965. This is simply not the case. The average 1939 nickel found in circulation is in much higher condition than the average 1965 nickel. Indeed all 1965 nickels are between AG and F while all the old nickels you find are between VG and AU.
The few surviving 1965 nickels circulate freely but most of the old nickels started getting taken out on circulation around 1960. A '39 nickel circulated only a couple decades while the 1965 nickel has been doing heavy duty 6 decades. Old nickels are bought and sold while the new nickels are degraded and lost. You won't find a 1965 nickel in XF unless you look at thousands and thousands of coins. Don't even think about finding a nice 1971 in F.
The more things change...
On the contrary, I have found that the vast majority of war nickels remaining in circulation are quite worn. They typically grade AG-G when I find them. The occasional F-VF is remarkable. I once found an AU. 1939 nickels are scarce in circulation, but are present. I have even measured increasing density over the past 5 years for 1939. Currently, they sit at approximately 0.07% to 0.1% density. This is data based on actual finds in large volumes of coins.
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Very interesting. Your sample size is plenty large enough to significant. I have certainly seen war nickels over the years in circulation. Back when I was hunting a lot of nickels 71 to '76 I figured about one in every 800 coins but I figured those were stragglers. Since then my sample size hasn't been large enough to make any conclusions but grades averaged G+ which is about the same as bags of war nickels today if you throw out the top 15% which I believe are just sample error caused by late release by the FED.
I can't imagine any reason people would preferentially release worn silver so you might just be right. But if you are it raises the question, why aren't those people pulling out old nickels saving the silver?
Very likely they are (I am of course!). But I believe there is a significant population of war nickels not counted in the general census estimates. Those would be the coins in jars across the nation, and those currently held in the Federal Reserve storage. If the stats I’ve gathered held true for all nickels in circulation, it would mean that there are still 50 million war nickels in circulation! Now, I’m sure the actual number is nowhere near that high. The data can be skewed by coins re-entering circulation that would have been at one time counted in the estimated survival. But it would not be unreasonable to theorize there could be upwards of a million war nickels in combined static/active circulation that are numismaticly unknown, a large number of will probably never be found at all.
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Since 1972 the mint and FED have been rotating their stocks of coins so they can't be coming from this source. However, I can think of one possibility. The federal reserve branches used to use a large quantity of coins in transactions and stored many coins in house in case of shortages. I've heard of as many as 3,000,000 coins of a single denomination. Most were dispersed decades ago but you may be getting your nickels near a branch that periodically releases more coins as they need thew vault space. War nickels can easily slip by collectors seeking 90% coins. The uglier and darker circulating nickels get the more easily they slip by.
It would take only one or two releases like this over a couple years to be very hard to see. If this is the case then you should also be seeing a great number (one or two per roll) of late '50's and early 60's coins in XF.