Editorial policy
Why there is no price guide here
Every other question this site answers has a source behind it. Collector values do not, at least not one we are allowed to use, and the decision not to publish them shapes everything else about how this site is built.
The short answer
Canadian retail coin values live in the Charlton catalogue and in the price data the grading services publish. Both are copyrighted works, both represent decades of accumulated commercial judgement, and neither has licensed its data to this site. Reproducing them would be taking someone else’s work.
The alternative some sites reach for is to generate figures that look like catalogue values without being them. That is worse. A plausible wrong number is more dangerous than no number, because a plausible wrong number is the one a reader acts on. Someone sells a scarce date for melt, or pays a premium for a common one, on the strength of a figure that was never checked against anything.
So this site publishes what it can source and derive, and is explicit about the boundary.
What a catalogue value actually is
It is worth understanding what you would be getting even if we did publish one. A catalogue value is an estimate of a retail price, for a coin at a stated grade, at the time of publication. Change the grade by one step and the number can double. Change the market and it moves again.
Grading is a skill, it takes years to acquire, and the difference between two adjacent grades on a circulated coin is not something a photograph settles. A price guide handed to someone who cannot grade is not information. It is a number with a shape that resembles information.
What this site publishes instead
Three things, all of which have a source or a derivation you can check.
- Composition. What the Royal Canadian Mint says the coin is made of, quoted from its own tables, for every specification period of every denomination.
- Silver content. Calculated from the published weight and fineness, never transcribed. The arithmetic is shown on the silver content page.
- Reported mintage. How many the Mint says it struck, which is the only scarcity signal in the published record.
For a common circulated coin, the silver value is most of the answer, and it is an answer nobody has to take on trust.
Where the rest of the answer is
For a coin whose value is about condition rather than metal, the honest substitute is what people actually paid. Completed sales are not our estimate and not our judgement, which is precisely what makes them usable: we are not the ones making the claim.
Every denomination page and every year page on this site carries a link to completed sales for that coin. Those are affiliate links and are labelled as such, which is also why they go to sold listings rather than to active ones: active listings show what sellers hope for, and sending you to those would mislead you in the direction that flatters us.
What mintage can and cannot tell you
These are the eight lowest reported circulation mintages in the Mint’s published record. They are a signal to look further before selling, and they are not a valuation.
| Coin | Reported mintage | Rank within denomination |
|---|---|---|
| 1948 1 dollar | 18,780 | lowest 1 of 80 |
| 1932 50 cents | 19,213 | lowest 1 of 96 |
| 1948 50 cents | 37,784 | lowest 2 of 96 |
| 1945 1 dollar | 38,391 | lowest 2 of 80 |
| 1936 50 cents | 38,550 | lowest 3 of 96 |
| 1934 50 cents | 39,539 | lowest 4 of 96 |
| 1931 50 cents | 57,581 | lowest 5 of 96 |
| 1947 1 dollar | 86,730 | lowest 3 of 80 |
Read that table carefully and you can see why it is not a price guide. Mintage counts coins made, not coins that survive, and the Mint says so itself: it has no record of how many were later returned and melted. A denomination struck in small numbers for collectors can be commoner today than one struck in millions for circulation and then melted for its silver.
Mintage is one input into scarcity. Survival, condition and demand are the others, and none of them is in the published record.
The honest substitute
What Canadian coins have actually been selling for recently, rather than what a catalogue estimates or what a seller is asking.
Completed sales, newest first, so you are looking at what buyers paid rather than what sellers are asking. Affiliate link: we may earn a commission if you buy, at no cost to you, and it changes nothing on this page.
If the coin might be worth grading
Two rules that cost nothing and save a lot. Do not clean it: a bright cleaned coin is worth consistently less than a dark original one, and the damage is permanent. And do not sell a coin you have not identified, because on early Canadian issues the difference between a common date and a scarce one is not visible.