Old Canadian coins: which ones are silver?

The short answer

If you're sorting a jar of old Canadian change, look at the date first. Here's the quick version:

• 5 cents: silver if dated 1921 or earlier.
• 10 and 25 cents: silver if dated 1968 or earlier. Coins from 1908 to 1919 are sterling, and those from 1920 to 1966 are 80% silver. Coins from 1967 and 1968 may be 80% or 50% silver, and some 1968 coins have no silver at all.
• 50 cents and 1 dollar: silver if dated 1967 or earlier.
• 1 cent: never silver.

Canada's first silver coins

The first coins made for the Province of Canada are dated 1858. They were silver 5-, 10- and 20-cent pieces, plus bronze cents dated 1858 or 1859.

After Confederation, the new Dominion of Canada issued silver 5-, 10-, 25- and 50-cent pieces in 1870, all with the head of Queen Victoria on the front. From 1858 to 1907, most Canadian coins were struck at the Royal Mint in London, England, with some from the Heaton Mint in Birmingham.

That changed on January 2, 1908, when the Ottawa branch of Britain's Royal Mint opened. Its first coin was a silver 50-cent piece showing King Edward VII. That mint is now the Royal Canadian Mint, and its published coin specifications start in 1908, so our table does too.

Silver in Canada's circulating coins, by year

These are the Royal Canadian Mint's own figures. The rest of each silver coin was copper.

The drop from sterling to 80% came by law. A 1920 statute reduced the standard of fineness for Canada's silver coins to eight-tenths.

How much silver is in an 80% coin?

Using the Mint's published weights, here's the math for coins made from 1920 to 1967.

A troy ounce, the unit used to weigh precious metals, is 31.1034768 grams. So an old silver dollar holds about six-tenths of a troy ounce of silver.

The tiny silver nickel

From 1858 to 1921, Canada's 5-cent coin was made of silver. It had to hold five cents' worth of silver, so it was tiny: 15.5 millimetres across and just 1.16 grams.

Small coins are easy to lose, and the cost of silver was rising. Canada was also the largest producer of nickel in the world. So on January 3, 1922, new, larger nickel 5-cent coins went into circulation.

Silver dollars

Canada's first silver dollar for circulation was struck in 1935 to mark the silver jubilee of King George V's reign. Silver dollars were 80% silver every year from 1935 to 1967.

There was almost an earlier one. A law passed in 1910 allowed a silver dollar, and the mint made three trial pieces dated 1911: two in silver and one in lead. After Robert Borden's government was elected in 1911, the plan was scrapped, and the coin was never made for circulation. The Bank of Canada Museum has since brought all three trial pieces together for display.

1967 to 1968: the end of silver coins

In the 1960s, silver prices shaped what went into Canada's coins. As the Bank of Canada Museum puts it, the rising price of silver left the Royal Canadian Mint with two choices: make the coins extremely small, or change what they were made of.

The Mint changed the metal, in two steps:

• Summer 1967. The silver in the dime and quarter dropped from 80% to 50%.
• August 1968. Nickel replaced silver entirely in coins made for circulation, including a smaller 50-cent piece and dollar.

That's why 1967 and 1968 dimes and quarters are the tricky ones. Coins with the same date can hold different amounts of silver, or none. The designs don't help much either. The Bluenose schooner on the dime and the caribou on the quarter both date back to 1937, so they appear on silver and nickel coins alike.

Metal value and collector value

An old silver coin can be worth something in two ways. Its melt value is the value of the silver you could get by melting it down. Its collector value, or numismatic value, depends on things like rarity, condition, demand and history.

The Royal Canadian Mint notes that demand is the single biggest factor that can push a coin's value up. Rarity and condition matter too, so a coin can be worth more than its silver.

Condition counts, so bring your coins in just as you found them.

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