Royal Canadian Mint record · 7 denominations · 684 denomination-years · 1908 to 2024
Every circulation coin Canada has struck since the Ottawa mint opened, taken from the Royal Canadian Mint’s own record: 47 composition periods, a reported mintage for each of 684 denomination-years, 62 reverse designs and the portrait each year carries. Where a coin holds silver, the site works that out from the published weight and fineness and prices it at today’s market. Nothing here is typed in from memory.
Start here
Each denomination page carries every composition the Mint publishes for it, the reported mintage for every year, the reverse designs, and a page for each individual year. That is true of the coins that never held any silver as much as of the ones that did.
1908 to 2012
1 cent · penny
8 compositions, 5 reverse designs, 35,257,341,680 struck across 105 years. Never struck in silver.
1908 to 2024
5 cents · nickel
10 compositions, 9 reverse designs, 6,792,105,976 struck across 117 years. Silver until 1921.
1908 to 2024
10 cents · dime
7 compositions, 5 reverse designs, 10,714,584,568 struck across 117 years. Silver until 1967.
1908 to 2024
25 cents · quarter
8 compositions, 13 reverse designs, 8,225,914,525 struck across 117 years. Silver until 1968.
1908 to 2016
50 cents · half dollar
5 compositions, 5 reverse designs, 172,602,247 struck across 109 years. Silver until 1967.
1935 to 2024
1 dollar
7 compositions, 20 reverse designs, 1,694,106,382 struck across 90 years. Silver until 1967.
1996 to 2024
2 dollars · toonie
2 compositions, 5 reverse designs, 1,077,596,500 struck across 29 years. Never struck in silver.
Not silver, not an afterthought
1908 to 2012 · 105 years on record
Struck from 1858 and withdrawn from circulation in 2012. Bronze, then plated zinc, then plated steel. It never contained silver.
Struck in total
35,257,341,680
55.1 per cent of every circulation coin in this record.
Compositions
8
Metal changed 7 times across 5 reverse designs.
Every composition, mintage and year · The 2012 coin · Its reverse designs
1996 to 2024 · 29 years on record
Introduced in 1996, bimetallic from the start, and never struck in silver for circulation.
Struck in total
1,077,596,500
1.7 per cent of every circulation coin in this record.
Compositions
2
Metal changed 1 times across 5 reverse designs.
Every composition, mintage and year · The 2024 coin · Its reverse designs
The short version
Almost every question about an old Canadian coin comes down to one thing, and it is not how the coin looks. A worn 1966 quarter and a worn 1970 quarter are the same size, the same colour and carry the same caribou. One is four fifths silver and the other has none at all.
Canada removed silver from its coinage in stages. The 5-cent piece lost it first, in 1921. The rest held on until the late 1960s, when the silver price climbed past the point where the metal in a coin was worth more than the coin, and the government cut the fineness and then removed it entirely. The change happened partway through a calendar year, so 1967 and 1968 each produced coins of two different metals wearing the same date.
That single fact is the reason this site is organised by denomination and year rather than by anything a photograph could show you. It is not the only thing the record holds, though: the same tables carry the mintage of every year, the metal of every period, and the design each coin was struck with.
Last silver year, by denomination
| Denomination | Silver from | Last silver year |
|---|---|---|
| 1 cent penny | never | never |
| 5 cents nickel | 1908 | 1921 |
| 10 cents dime | 1908 | 1967 |
| 25 cents quarter | 1908 | 1968 |
| 50 cents half dollar | 1908 | 1967 |
| 1 dollar | 1935 | 1967 |
| 2 dollars toonie | never | never |
From the Mint’s published specification periods. A coin dated after the last silver year in its row contains none, whatever it looks like.
Every silver standard Canada struck
Silver content is the Mint’s published weight multiplied by its published fineness and divided by a troy ounce. Values move with the silver market and update in your browser.
| Coin | Years | Weight | Silver | Value today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 cents | 1967 - 1968 | 5.05 g | 0.0812 ozt | $7.31 |
One of several things this site does
5 of the seven denominations were struck in silver at some point, and for those the metal is a real number rather than an opinion. Pick a denomination and a date and the calculator takes the Mint’s published weight and fineness for that year, converts it to troy ounces, and prices it at the current market.
It will not answer for a base metal coin, and it says so rather than showing a figure. A nickel quarter is worth twenty-five cents, and the useful page for one of those is the year page, which carries its mintage, its composition and its design.
Melt calculator
The rest of the record
62 reverse designs
The caribou, the Bluenose, the voyageur and every commemorative reverse, with the years each was struck.
Portraits by year
Which monarch and which effigy is on the obverse of a coin, from the year on its face alone.
Mint marks
What a letter under the date means, and why most Canadian circulation coins carry no mark at all.
Every year, 1908 to 2024
One page per year: every denomination struck that year, its metal, its mintage and its designs.
Before the Ottawa mint
Why this record starts in 1908, and what struck Canadian coins for the fifty years before it.
Why there is no price guide
What a catalogue value is, why this site does not publish one, and what to use instead.
It will not tell you what a collector would pay. Canadian retail values come from the Charlton catalogue and from the grading services, they are proprietary, and we have no licence to reproduce them. Generating numbers that looked like them would be worse than publishing nothing, because a plausible wrong figure is the one a reader acts on.
What it will tell you is the part that is a matter of public record and simple arithmetic: what the Mint says the coin is made of, how many were struck, what it was designed with, and, for a silver coin, how much silver that works out to and what it is worth right now. For a common circulated date that is most of the answer. For a scarce one it is the floor, and the page will say so.
One source, not a blend of several. The Royal Canadian Mint publishes a page for each circulation denomination carrying the composition, weight, diameter and thickness for every specification period, and a reported mintage for every year from 1908. Those pages are mirrored, parsed, and committed to this site’s repository so a build cannot silently change what it says.
Silver content is never transcribed. It is calculated from the weight and fineness in the same row, because a transcribed constant is a constant that can be wrong. Where the Mint publishes nothing, this site publishes nothing, and the methodology page names each of those gaps.
Mirror retrieved 2026-09-04.
The list
An occasional email with two triggers and no schedule. It goes out when the Royal Canadian Mint publishes or revises a circulation coin specification and this site is rebuilt from it, and when the silver price moves far enough to change what a jar of old change is actually worth. The Mint does not publish often, so neither does this.
One address, held so the email can be sent. What is collected and how it is handled is in the privacy notice, and every email carries an unsubscribe link. No catalogue values, no price forecasts, and nothing telling you whether to buy or sell.