1975 dimes with no Mint marks are common (except for two): Monday Morning Brief, March 13 (2024)

Full Video Transcript:

Good morning. This is William T. Gibbs with Coin World's Monday Morning Brief.

We get a lot of questions from all of you out there. We like them. Some of you email us with your questions, others pick up the phone and call, and yet others of you like to use traditional mail to ask us about a coin or medal that you have found.

Now, I wish we had time to answer every single question. We answer as many as we can, but there aren't enough hours in the day or the week for us to answer every question. We do what we can. However, recently I have noticed that I've been receiving the same question over and over from different individuals, so I'm going to answer that one today in this video.

It comes from people who are finding 1975 Roosevelt dimes in circulation without Mint marks, and they're vaguely aware of the possibility that these are rare and valuable, and maybe worth a lot of money.

Well, they're not.

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Longtime collectors know that the P Mint mark was not used on U.S. coins, except for briefly during World War II, until 1979 and 1980. In 1975, no coins had P Mint marks, and the Philadelphia Mint struck millions and millions of dimes, all with no Mint marks. If you find one of those in circulation, it's common. It's worth face value. However, there are two 1975 dimes without Mint marks that are rare and are valuable, but these are found in Proof sets.

In 1975, the San Francisco Mint struck a small number of Proof Roosevelt dimes without that facility's S Mint mark. Those are the rare ones.

Now, the first set surfaced in July of 1977, when it was sent to Coin World for us to look at. I was here at that time. I remember looking at the set. We reported on it; shortly thereafter a second one of these sets also surfaced. Both of those sets were eventually, within the next few months, authenticated by ANACS and then they disappeared from public view. They just vanished, for more than 30 years.

Flash forward to spring of 2011, when the second of those sets that had been reported all those years ago resurfaced, this time as consignment to an upcoming ANA convention auction by Stack's Bowers. Now, that summer when that set was auctioned by Stack's Bowers, it brought almost $350,000, making the dime in that set not only one of the most valuable dimes in the U.S. coin series, but also making that dime one of the most valuable U.S. coins of the second half of the 20th century.

Roosevelt dime: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's sudden death of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, compelled Treasury officials to recommend the late president's portrait to be immediately placed on a coin of regular issue. How much are Roosevelt dimes worth?

So you can understand why people vaguely familiar with this story would get excited if they found a 1975 dime in circulation with no Mint mark. Again, the big difference is that: found in circulation it's common; found in a Proof set with no Mint mark, could be rare.

Now, interestingly, after that one set surfaced as a consignment in the auction, the owner of the other set also surfaced, and it turns out he lived a very short drive from our offices here at Coin World in Sidney, Ohio. He brought the set in to us; it was the same one that I had seen all those years ago in 1977. So it was great to revisit that set.

Now, he intends to keep that set for a very long time, so it's unlikely that it will appear in the marketplace any time soon. But again, to reiterate, if you find a 1975 dime in circulation with no Mint mark, it's common, it's worth face value. But if you were to find one in a Proof set, then it's possible that you may have one of those unreported versions of those dimes.

For Coin World, this is William T. Gibbs. Thank you.