About this site

What this is

A reference for Canadian circulation coinage covering 684 denomination-year combinations across 117 years, from 1908 to 2024. For each one it publishes what the Royal Canadian Mint says the coin is made of, how much silver that works out to, how many were struck, and what that silver is worth at today’s price.

It exists because the most common question about an old Canadian coin has a good, checkable answer that is surprisingly hard to find, and because the places that answer it usually mix it with a great deal that is not checkable at all.

Who it is for

Mostly for someone who has inherited a tin. That reader does not have a collection, does not know how to grade, and is not going to learn before the weekend. They want to know whether there is anything in the tin worth keeping separate, and they want the answer without being sold anything.

For that reader the honest answer is largely arithmetic: sort by date, find the silver, work out what the silver is worth, and be told plainly when a coin is a question about condition rather than about metal. That is what this site does.

It is also useful to collectors, but it is not written for them. A collector already knows what a 1948 dime is. This site tells them how much silver is in it and gets out of the way.

The three rules

One source, named on every page. Everything factual here comes from the Royal Canadian Mint’s own published circulation coin record. Not from a catalogue, not from a forum, not from a blend of several compilations that disagree. The methodology page names both sources, their retrieval date, and every place they fall silent.

Derive, do not transcribe. The silver content of a coin is calculated from the Mint’s published weight and fineness every time a page is built. It is never typed in. A transcribed constant is a constant that can be wrong, and it can be wrong quietly for a very long time.

If it cannot be sourced, it is not published. No collector values, no grades, no varieties, no mint mark table for years the Mint does not document, no mintage figures for the fifty years before the Ottawa mint opened. A missing field is fine. A confidently wrong one is not.

How it pays for itself

Through affiliate links to completed eBay sales, labelled as affiliate links every single time they appear. If you follow one and buy something, this site may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Those links exist for a reason beyond the money. This site deliberately publishes no catalogue values, which leaves a real gap for anyone whose coin is worth more than its metal. Completed sales close that gap honestly: they are not our estimate, they are what people actually paid, and pointing at them costs us no credibility because we are not the ones making the claim.

Every one of those links goes to sold listings rather than active ones. Active listings show what sellers hope for, which runs consistently higher than what coins fetch, and sending you there would mislead you in exactly the direction that flatters us.

Full disclosures.

Independence

Nobody buys a position here. No dealer, mint, grading service, auction house or bullion firm pays for a mention, a placement or a ranking, and there is no mechanism by which one could: there is nothing to buy on this site and no directory to be listed in. Where a link earns a commission on a purchase you make after following it, it says so at the point where you might click it.

The figures are not for sale either, which is the more important point. A melt value on this site is the Mint’s published weight times its published fineness times the market price, and no commercial arrangement can move any of those three numbers. That is not a promise about our character; it is a property of how the site is built. There is nowhere in the pipeline for a paid adjustment to go.

Contact

Corrections, sources and questions go through the contact form. There is no address published on the site to harvest, and no ticket number at the other end.

Corrections are the most useful thing you can send, particularly if you have a citable public record that closes one of the gaps named on the methodology page. Every correction that changes something on the site is logged publicly on the corrections page, including the ones that are embarrassing.