As of recent estimates, it costs more than 2 cents to produce a single penny. The U.S. Mint reported that in 2023, the cost was approximately 2.73 cents per penny.

In 2023, creating dimes, quarters and half dollars generated more than $433 million in revenue. Minting pennies and nickels ate away about $179 million of that profit.

A 2022 Federal Reserve survey found that Americans paid with cash just 18 percent of the time.

A modern penny weighs 2.5 grams. Before 1982, when pennies were made mostly of copper, they weighed 3.11 grams. Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.

There are an estimated 140 billion pennies currently in circulation in the United States.

A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child in the US. Despite their abundance, many pennies end up out of circulation, being stored in jars or discarded.

Since 1982, the penny has been composed of 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper. Prior to that, it was mostly copper (95% copper and 5% zinc).

Canada got rid of its penny in 2013 because it cost 1.6 cents to produce and had, like its American cousin, become essentially worthless. The final digit of Canadian cash transactions is rounded to the nearest nickel: 1 and 2, nearest to 0 nickels, round down to 0; 3 and 4 round up to a nickel — 5; 6 and 7, also nearest to one nickel, round down — 5 again; 8 and 9, nearest to 10 cents, round up. In 2007, Robert Whaples, the Wake Forest economist, analyzed tens of thousands of transactions from a convenience-store chain to see whether cash-register totals would tend to be rounded up more often than down. “The last digit’s pretty random,” Whaples said.