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Mercury dime value, and the one date worth a car

A common Mercury dime is worth about its silver, six to ten dollars. The 1916-D is worth a hundred times that, and it is the most faked dime in America.

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Mercury Dime, Roosevelt Dime

In the Buck index

  • Mercury DimeUnited States · 1916–1945 · Silver (.900)$6.01 to $9.97
  • Roosevelt DimeUnited States · 1946–1964 · Silver (.900)$4.98 to $5.79

The Mercury dime, properly the Winged Liberty Head dime, was struck from 1916 to 1945. The figure is Liberty in a winged cap, meaning freedom of thought, not the god Mercury, but the nickname stuck within weeks and has never come off.

It is 90% silver and 2.5 g, so a common one carries roughly two dollars of metal. Buck prices circulated examples at about $6.01 to $9.97, the premium over melt being the collector demand for a series people genuinely like.

The 1916-D

264,000 struck at Denver, against sixty million from the other two mints combined. It is the key to the series and one of the best-known key dates in American coins: several hundred dollars in the lowest collectable grade, thousands in decent condition.

It is also, for exactly that reason, faked constantly. The standard fake is a genuine Philadelphia 1916 dime with a D added to the reverse. Things to look at:

  • The D should sit at a specific position and angle left of the fasces base, and the mint mark on a genuine coin is slightly rounded, not sharp-edged.
  • The surface around an added mint mark is usually disturbed, tooled or unnaturally smooth.
  • Weight and diameter should be 2.50 g and 17.9 mm.

Any 1916-D worth buying comes in a grading service holder. There is no reason to accept a raw one.

The other dates worth checking

  • 1921 and 1921-D. Low mintages in a bad year for the economy. Both carry a strong premium.
  • 1942/1 and 1942/1-D overdates. A 1941 die repunched with a 42; the underlying 1 is visible inside the 2. Hundreds of dollars, and easy to miss without magnification.
  • 1926-S, scarce in higher grades.

Everything else in the run is common, and its value is silver plus a couple of dollars.

Full bands

The premium grade for Mercury dimes is FB, full bands: the horizontal bands around the middle of the fasces on the reverse showing complete separation. A weakly struck coin has them merged. An MS-65 with full bands can be worth several times an MS-65 without.

This is a strike characteristic, not wear, so it is set at the moment the coin is made and never improves.

The mint mark

Reverse, to the left of the base of the fasces. D for Denver, S for San Francisco, nothing for Philadelphia. It is a small letter in an awkward place and it is the difference between a $7 coin and a $700 one, so it is worth photographing rather than squinting at.

The Roosevelt dime replaced the Mercury in 1946 and stayed 90% silver until 1964, which means a lot of silver dimes are still findable if you know the date.

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