1945 10C MS66 Certification #34376186, PCGS #5056

Charles Morgan

The Mercury Dime reached its final year of production in 1945. Adolph A. Weinman’s celebrated design was first issued in 1916, a year before the United States entered World War I; its production concluded only after America detonated a pair of atomic bombs over Japan to hasten the end of World War II. The world the design entered was vastly different from the one it left.

Despite the transition from the "Winged Liberty" motif to the Roosevelt Dime, the Mercury design remained a fixture in American life for another two decades, appearing regularly in the back-page ads of Silver Age comic books. When the era of circulating silver coinage ended in the mid-1960s, the era of finding Mercury Dimes in pocket change vanished along with it.

The 1945 Mercury Dime: A Tale of Conditional Rarity

The Philadelphia Mint struck 159,130,000 Mercury dimes in 1945 (#5056, #5057), making it one of only five dates in the series to surpass the 100-million-coin threshold. While such output became routine by the 1950s—and a new benchmark of over 1 billion coins would define high-mintage years in the 1960s—the 1945 issue has always been considered a common date due to its status as a high-mintage, final-year issue.

However, in the 1970s, a more nuanced view of the series emerged. Dealers Tom McAfee of Winter Park, Florida, and David Hall, the future founder of PCGS, began to promote the collection of fully struck Mercury dimes with Full Bands (FB).

In this new context, the 1945 Philadelphia issue was elevated from a common date to the single most challenging coin in the series to acquire with a premium strike attribution. A mere 1.26% of the 1945 Philadelphia dimes graded by PCGS qualify for the designation.

Regarding the typical 1945 Mercury dime, PCGS has certified over 11,000 examples, with the majority concentrated in the MS64 to MS66 range. While these coins are often brilliant, examples featuring spectacular toning—sourced from original rolls or vintage albums—periodically appear on the market. The condition census tops out at MS68/MS68+, and these elite specimens appear at public auction at a rate of approximately one per year.

Vintage Market Snippets

• Coin dealer Lu Riggs offered uncirculated rolls for $6 in the August 1948 issue of The Numismatist.
• At an April 2016 online auction, Stack’s Bowers sold a BU roll of 1945 Mercury Dimes for $493.50.

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