Key Date Coins: What They Are

A key date is the coin that stops you finishing the set. In any series with an active collector base, one or two date-and-mint combinations are markedly harder to find than the rest, and because everyone assembling the series needs exactly one of them, demand concentrates on a single issue. That concentration, more than raw scarcity, is what creates the price.

What makes a date "key"

Three things have to line up. The coin has to be genuinely hard to find, which is a question of survival rather than mintage. The series has to be widely collected, so that many people are hunting the same coin. And the coin has to be identifiable, so that collectors know when they have found one.

Remove any of the three and the premium collapses. A rare coin in a series nobody collects is merely obscure.

The 1909-S VDB

The most famous key date in American coinage exists because of a small act of official squeamishness. Victor David Brenner designed the Lincoln cent, and his initials, VDB, appeared on the reverse of the earliest 1909 coins. They were removed almost immediately. They did not return until 1918, when they were placed discreetly on the cutoff of Lincoln's bust, where they still sit.

That left a narrow window: 1909 cents struck at San Francisco carrying VDB on the reverse. Every collector filling a Lincoln cent album needs one, the series is perhaps the most collected in the world, and the coin is easy to identify. Those three facts together are the whole explanation. See cents and early copper.

Mintage is a trap

The instinct is to look up mintage figures and assume the lowest number is the key. It is often wrong, and the Buffalo nickel series shows why.

The 1931-S was struck in a quantity of just 194,000 early in the year. Acting Mint Director Mary Margaret O'Reilly, worried the pieces would be hoarded, asked San Francisco to strike more, and by melting down worn-out nickels the mint found enough metal for a million more. Large quantities were saved anyway, in the hope they would rise in price, and the coin is not particularly rare today. The lowest mintage in the whole series belongs to the 1926-S at 970,000, the only date-mint combination under a million, and it is the harder coin to find well preserved.

The hoarders spoiled their own investment, which happens more often than collectors like to admit.

Varieties are not dates

Some of the coins collectors chase hardest are not dates at all but errors that escaped the mint. The 1937-D three-legged Buffalo nickel, on which one of the bison's legs is missing, was created when a pressman at the Denver Mint tried to remove clash marks from a reverse die and took a leg with them. Thousands were struck before inspectors condemned the die.

The 1938-D/S Buffalo nickel, where dies bearing an S were repunched with a D, was the first repunched mint mark discovered on any US coin, and caused great excitement when it came to light in 1962. Neither of these is scarce because few were struck. They are scarce because they were mistakes.

And do not confuse a key date with an old date. Scarcity, demand and grade set the price. What makes a coin valuable lays out all five factors.