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How Common is the 1881-S Morgan Dollar?

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The 1881-S Morgan Dollar may be one of the most common coins in its series but it nevertheless is a terrific coin for collectors and investors due to the many exciting avenues it offers for those building sets or portfolios. Courtesy of PCGS TrueView. Click image to enlarge.

The 1881-S Morgan Dollar is among the most common of all issues in the popular series. But just how common is the 1881-S Morgan Dollar? How many 1881-S Morgan Dollars were struck?

Let’s first discuss the base mintage for the 1881-S Morgan Dollar, which stood at 12,760,000 coins. That number represents a high-average figure for the series. However, a mintage of over 12 million isn’t necessarily why the coin is relatively common today, as some coins with higher mintages are actually quite scarce these days. The reasoning behind this has more to do with the number of survivors, including those in higher grades. That is in part a function of how many coins were saved en masse early on.

While there’s little doubt that many 1881-S Morgan Dollars have been melted over the years or otherwise lost to the hands of time, there’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that the 1881-S Morgan Dollar is one of the most common coins in the series today. One needn’t look any further than the PCGS Population Report to confirm this. As of this writing in March 2025, the PCGS Population Report reveals 315,686 encapsulated examples of the 1881-S Morgan Dollar, with 303,894 MS examples, 10,535 PL specimens, and 1,257 DMPLs.

All told, the total figure of PCGS-graded 1881-S Morgan Dollars represents a whopping 7.7% of all PCGS Morgan Dollars, a series with a cumulative 4,092,272 examples graded by PCGS. It’s also important to note that the 1881-S Morgan Dollar is the most prolifically represented issue among all PCGS-graded Morgan Dollars. It even beats out the number of PCGS-encapsulated 1921 Morgan Dollars, which saw the highest overall mintages of the entire series.

What does this mean for the collector or investor? Perhaps most importantly, the takeaway here is that the 1881-S Morgan Dollar offers buyers a vast number of examples available for sale, which helps influence lower prices in general for the issue – especially among circulated and lower Mint State grades; this makes the 1881-S Morgan Dollar an affordable option for anyone looking to add an example to their collection or portfolio.

The high PCGS population of 1881-S Morgan Dollars also means that the collector or investor has plenty of examples to choose from when seeking a certain grade threshold of surface and eye appeal characteristics. Finally, it should be noted that the 1881-S Morgan Dollar is one of just a handful of issues in the series offering nearly numismatically perfect examples, with currently two specimens graded MS69. That’s no doubt an astonishing grade for any coin, and particularly a large, heavy piece from the Gilded Age. Such a coin is coveted among many collectors and certainly those who are building PCGS Registry Sets of business-strike Morgan Dollars.

This all boils down to the salient takeaway that there are indeed many reasons to embrace a common coin like the 1881-S Morgan Dollar. It’s a terrific coin for the collector and investor with numerous affordable options for the buyer on a shoestring budget and many challenging opportunities for the high-end PCGS Registry Set member.

Morgan Dollars (1878-1921)