The United States has always changed its money reluctantly, and for most of two centuries that reluctance has been a virtue. Currency works because people trust it, recognize it without thinking, and know instinctively what to do with it. A system that changes constantly forfeits all three. But a system that never changes stops being a design and becomes an accumulation of historical accidents, and American coinage passed that point some time ago.
In 2025 the U.S. Mint suspended production of circulating pennies after more than 230 years. The arithmetic had become impossible to defend: the Mint reported a production and distribution cost of 3.02 cents for a one-cent coin, and projected roughly $56 million a year in reduced material costs from stopping. Nothing was confiscated and nothing was invalidated. Existing pennies remain legal tender, they remain in circulation, and they will keep turning up in drawers and pockets for years. What ended was the manufacture of new ones for ordinary commerce.
That decision is usually described as the retirement of an obsolete coin, which undersells it. It is the first official admission in living memory that a denomination can outlive its purpose. Having made that admission about the penny, the country has no principled reason to stop there.
A more rational system is available. The current assortment of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, oversized half-dollars, seldom-used dollar coins, and ubiquitous dollar bills could be replaced by coins of 10, 20, and 50 cents and one dollar, and notes of $2, $10, $20, $50, and $100 — with the $2 bill as the smallest note in routine circulation.
Under that scheme the dime survives unchanged and the nickel disappears. The quarter gives way to two coins rather than one: a 20-cent piece at the nickel’s diameter, finished in rose, and a 50-cent piece that inherits the quarter’s own diameter and is finished in black. The Kennedy half-dollar, still built to proportions inherited from an era when the coin contained silver, disappears with it. The golden dollar already in production becomes the ordinary one-dollar unit, ideally in a lighter alloy. Four coins, four sizes, four colors, and a set that can be read by hand or by eye without reading a word on it. New $1 notes stop being printed, the $5 note is retired alongside the nickel for the same reason, and the $2 note — which already exists, already circulates, and startles cashiers precisely because it is so rare — is produced in enough volume to become unremarkable. Each surviving note takes the color of the coin that shares its numeral, across its whole printed face — the $10 silver, the $20 rose, the $50 black, the $100 gold — while the $2 keeps Washington’s portrait and the green it has always worn.
None of this argues for abolishing cash. The argument runs the other way. Cash that is going to survive in a society dominated by electronic payment deserves to be designed on purpose rather than inherited by default.
The case for 10, 20, 50, and 100 cents is not that the numbers are new. It is that a person can hold the whole system in their head.
Every denomination has an obvious relationship to a dollar: ten dimes, five 20-cent pieces, two half-dollars, one dollar coin. That sounds trivial until it is compared with what Americans actually use. The quarter is familiar, and four of them making a dollar is among the first pieces of arithmetic a child learns, but 25 is a stranger to the 1-2-5 progression that organizes most modern currency and measurement. Because 25 does not fit that progression, the coin below it has to be a nickel and the coin below that a penny, and the system needs six denominations to cover a single dollar.
A 20-cent coin ends that problem, and it ends it in a way that shows up in the register rather than in a policy paper. Thirty cents becomes 20 plus 10. Forty becomes 20 plus 20. Seventy is 50 plus 20, eighty is 50 plus 20 plus 10, and ninety is 50 plus 20 plus 20. Across every ten-cent amount from a dime to ninety cents, the proposed set averages fewer than two coins. The dime-quarter-half combination Americans carry now averages nearly three, because once the smallest coin is a dime the quarter stops being useful at all. It never appears in the best combination for any ten-cent amount: two quarters make fifty cents, and a half-dollar does the same job with one coin.
The 20-cent piece has one further advantage, and it is psychological rather than mathematical. Five of them make a dollar exactly. That is a relationship a cashier can be taught in a sentence and a second-grader can verify with a handful of coins, which is more than can be said for the 30-cent denominations occasionally floated in this kind of proposal. A coin that cannot divide a dollar evenly has to be explained every time it is used.
The half-dollar belongs in the set for a similar reason: it sits at the midpoint of the dollar and fills the gap between 20 cents and 100. The trouble with America’s half-dollar has never been its value. Federal law specifies a coin 30.61 millimeters across and weighing 11.34 grams, dimensions that made sense when the coin contained silver and make none now. By comparison, the golden dollar in production today is 26.49 millimeters and 8.1 grams. The half-dollar is both larger and heavier than a coin worth twice as much.
The answer to that is not to abandon 50 cents. It is to build a 50-cent coin for the century it will circulate in.
Coin design is often discussed as though a denomination were something printed on a metal disc, to be read by whoever holds it. Almost no one reads a coin. People identify coins by feel, in pockets and purses, in dark cars, at counters while looking somewhere else entirely. A blind person has to distinguish denominations without reference to color. Someone with failing eyesight should not have to hold a coin up to the light to learn whether it is worth 20 cents or a dollar.
That argues for redundancy — several independent identification systems working at once, so that failing to perceive one still leaves the others. Diameter, thickness, weight, edge texture, the relief of the design itself, and color are all available, and a well-designed family uses all of them.
The order in that list is deliberate, and it is the order a designer should work in. The first five are read by the hand. Color is read only by the eye, and a currency that leans on color is a currency that works beautifully for people who can see it and no better than today’s for people who cannot. So color should arrive last, as a fast shortcut for sighted users laid over a set that is already fully distinguishable without it — never as the thing carrying the denomination.
Relief deserves particular mention, because it is routinely mistaken for decoration. It is not. People who cannot see identify coins by the feel of the embossment, and a portrait, a wreath and a shield are as distinguishable under a thumb as they are under an eye. A coin design brief that treats the imagery as art and the edge as engineering has the division exactly backwards; both are instruments, and both should be tested on the people who will actually be reading them that way.
The dime should be left mostly alone. Americans recognize it instantly, it costs the Mint 6.77 cents to produce and distribute against a ten-cent face value, and redesigning a successful coin for the sake of consistency would be vandalism dressed as reform. A change of alloy to reduce that cost is worth doing and is not urgent — and it is further along than most people would guess, the Mint having already finished testing a cheaper cupronickel for the dime and three other denominations and being unable to use it without congressional authorization.
The 20-cent piece should take the retiring nickel’s 21.21-millimeter diameter and a rose-colored cladding — copper over the same pure-copper core the Mint already uses. Two things recommend the size. It leaves a clean 3.30 millimeters between the dime and the 20-cent piece, which is a gap a thumb can read without being asked to; and it is a diameter the country’s coin-handling equipment already accommodates, because the nickel has been that size since 1883. The color does the rest of the work. Nothing else in the set is rose, and nothing about a rose-colored disc invites confusion with the silver coin below it or the gold coin two steps above.
Its edge should be immediately distinguishable by touch. One workable pattern divides the circumference into two pairs of textured sections separated by wide smooth gaps — texture, texture, gap, texture, texture, gap. The precise engineering would have to come out of accessibility testing rather than out of an essay, but the principle is simple enough: a person who cannot see the coin should be able to run a thumb around it and know what it is.
That edge is for people. It is not for machines, and the distinction matters more than it might appear. Electronic coin validators generally work from some combination of dimensions, mass, and electromagnetic properties, not from decorative reeding, which means the tactile design and the machine-recognition design are separate problems that happen to share a coin.
The half-dollar has always been the hardest piece of the puzzle, and the difficulty was geometric. The quarter is 24.26 millimeters. The golden dollar is 26.49. That leaves 2.23 millimeters of space, and no third coin fits inside it.
The answer is to stop asking diameter to do a job it cannot do, and to notice that retiring the quarter frees the very size the half-dollar needs. The 50-cent piece should take the quarter’s 24.26-millimeter diameter, which no longer belongs to anything, and should be finished in black — a dark plated surface over a conventional clad core.
That produces a set separated twice over. The diameters run 17.91, 21.21, 24.26 and 26.49 millimeters, four clean steps with nothing squeezed between anything, and they run in order of value. The colors do not, and cannot: the dime and the dollar are being kept as they are, which fixes silver and gold at the two ends of the lightness range and puts the least and the most valuable coin side by side there. What the colors do instead is spread — black, rose, gold, silver-white, four degrees of lightness far enough apart that no two of them meet. That is the useful property, and it is not the same thing as an ordering. A scale of lightness survives what a scale of hue does not: most color blindness leaves lightness intact, and so does bad light, and so does the yellowing of an aging eye. There are only so many things four shades can be asked to do, and telling each other apart is the one that matters.
Two things should be said plainly about the black coin. No country appears to have issued one for general circulation, so the United States would be first, and being first is a reason for testing rather than for confidence. And a dark finish on a coin is a plating rather than a cladding — a surface, not a metal that goes all the way through. Surfaces wear.
Neither is disqualifying, and the reason is the same reason this section began with. Color is one identifier out of six. The Lincoln cent has been copper-plated zinc since 1982; worn cents show zinc through the copper by the billion and nobody has ever failed to recognize one, because diameter, weight and a familiar profile were carrying the denomination the whole time. A half-dollar whose black has dulled is a shabby half-dollar, not a mystery. What it does mean is that the finish deserves the money and the testing that a load-bearing feature deserves.
The advantages of this arrangement over the alternative the Mint would otherwise face are considerable. A bimetallic half-dollar — a silver ring around a gold center — would also be unmistakable, and it was the obvious answer while the 50-cent piece had no diameter of its own. But the Mint’s own research recommended bimetallic construction for face values of one dollar and above, having found a capital-cost premium of roughly two-thirds of a cent per coin, and a 50-cent piece sits below that line. Giving the coin a diameter of its own removes the need to argue with that recommendation at all.
Its edge should carry five textured sections separated by five smooth gaps, a pattern no other coin in the set would share. Thickness and weight would add further distinctions. The coin does not need to be dramatically heavier than the 20-cent piece; it needs only to be different enough that the difference registers without attention.
What none of this escapes is that changing what a coin looks like to a machine has a price, and the Mint has had that price costed. A 2012 alternative-metals study commissioned by the Mint put the one-time cost to the American coin-handling community of altering a coin’s electromagnetic signature, without altering its dimensions at all, at $277 million to $375 million for non-ferromagnetic materials and $531 million to $632 million for ferromagnetic ones. A rose cladding and a black finish are both changes of that kind. The figures are not an estimate of this proposal’s cost, and they are not offered as one, but they establish the scale of what a composition decision commits the country to — and they are the reason composition has to be designed around the installed base of machines from the first day, rather than presented to industry as a finished decision.
The dollar coin has already solved its hardest problem. The golden dollar does not look like a quarter, which is the failure the Susan B. Anthony dollar never overcame, and federal law already requires it to be golden in color with distinctive tactile and visual characteristics. It should stay golden and should remain the only fully gold-colored coin in circulation.
Its weight is another matter. At 8.1 grams the golden dollar is heavier than it needs to be for a coin meant to be carried in quantity, and if Americans are going to use dollar coins routinely, that weight should be treated as an engineering variable rather than a settled fact. The same applies to the 20-cent piece, whose diameter should be fixed at the retiring nickel’s but whose composition and final mass should stay open.
These three coins should be designed as one family. Designing them as three separate government projects is how a country ends up with a half-dollar bigger than its dollar.
Currency is only the visible layer of a cash system. Underneath it sit vending machines, parking meters, laundry equipment, transit gates, arcade games, self-checkout kiosks, bank sorters, supermarket coin counters, and cash recyclers: an enormous installed base of devices that examine coins mechanically or electronically and that have no opinions about monetary policy. Changing the coins imposes real costs on the people who own those machines, and no honest version of this proposal can wave that away.
The scale of those costs is genuinely uncertain, and the best available evidence comes with warnings attached. In a 2016 review of alternative coin metals, the Government Accountability Office reported industry estimates ranging from $2.4 billion to $10 billion to modify an estimated 22 million coin-processing machines for certain proposed steel-based coins. GAO also explained why it considered those estimates probably overstated — among other issues, the vending industry’s figure assumed seven million vending machines, while a 2015 industry estimate put the number closer to 4.5 million.
But two of GAO’s reasons for discounting the figures do not survive contact with this proposal, and honesty requires saying so. The low end of that range assumed no change to any coin’s dimensions, and the quarter was exempted because the Mint had decided against a steel quarter, leaving quarter-only machines untouched. This proposal changes dimensions and abolishes the quarter. Whatever the true number is, a proposal of this shape belongs nearer the top of GAO’s range than the bottom of it. The range is soft. The direction is not. A coin change that alters what a machine sees can cost the private sector a great deal of money.
Some of that cost is avoidable and some is not. Modern equipment may need nothing more than a configuration change or a validator update. Older equipment will need a new coin mechanism. The oldest, purely mechanical devices may have to be replaced outright. This is the strongest argument for changing the whole system at once rather than in installments: an operator who has to open a machine and replace a validator should have to do it once, for a coin family that is then stable for decades, rather than three times across fifteen years. A conversion window measured in years rather than months would let much of that work happen inside normal equipment replacement cycles.
There is also a specific problem that deserves more candor than it usually gets, because it is the one that touches the public directly.
Both new coins reuse a diameter that is being retired, and that is a convenience for the coin path and a problem for the coin’s value. Newer validators identify coins by metallurgy as well as size and would tell the old coin from the new one without difficulty, particularly since the rose cladding and the black finish change a coin’s electromagnetic signature by their nature. A great many older machines cannot do that. They work from size and weight, and to a machine of that generation a 24.26-millimeter disc is a quarter and a 21.21-millimeter disc is a nickel — which means a half-dollar dropped into an unconverted machine buys 25 cents of merchandise and a 20-cent piece buys five.
That is worth stating in the direction it actually runs. In both cases the loss falls on the customer and the windfall on the machine’s owner, who is therefore the party with the least reason to hurry. Color limits the damage rather than preventing it: nobody inserts a black coin believing it is a quarter, so the exposure is not a hidden extraction but a person who holds only new money standing in front of an old machine, choosing between overpaying knowingly and walking away. That is an inconvenience rather than a theft, and it is still a reason the conversion needs a published date and a rule rather than a hope that operators will get to it.
The usual response is that operators can simply reprice, and on much equipment both prices and accepted coin values are adjustable. But repricing does not make the problem disappear. It relocates it, and every available answer has a cost attached to somebody.
Consider a machine that charges a quarter. Reprice it to 20 cents and the customer gets the same product for less — unless the product shrinks to compensate, in which case the customer is paying the same for less. Reprice it to 30 cents and the customer is paying more, which is either straightforward inflation or an occasion to make the product larger. Neither is neutral, and neither is obviously right.
The laundry room makes the difficulty sharper, because there the arithmetic simply does not close. A washer that takes five quarters — 125 cents — and whose mechanism accepts only one size of coin has to become either six 20-cent coins or seven. Six is 120 cents and the operator loses a nickel on every load. Seven is 140 cents and the customer pays fifteen cents more. There is no third option, because no whole number of 20-cent coins equals 125.
That example is worth sitting with, because it is not really about laundry. It is what happens whenever a price set on a five-cent grid has to be paid on a ten-cent one. The residual penny and nickel amounts embedded in tens of thousands of existing prices do not resolve cleanly into dimes, and no amount of transition planning will make them. An adjustment period in which many small prices move by a nickel in one direction or the other is not a failure of the plan. It is a structural consequence of raising the smallest physical unit of cash, and a proposal that promised otherwise would be lying.
What the country can do is give operators enough time and enough advance specification to choose intelligently. Businesses already running proprietary tokens can keep running them. Others may decide the conversion is the natural moment to add contactless payment and stop handling coins altogether. Currency reform does not have to dictate which of those is correct. It has to publish stable specifications early enough that the choice is a real one.
Every previous American attempt at a circulating dollar coin has failed for the same reason, and it is not a mystery. The dollar bill was still there.
People like notes, and the preference is not irrational. Bills lie flat, weigh almost nothing, stack in a wallet, and feel like money in a way that a fistful of coins does not. The preference has been measured. When the Government Accountability Office had the public surveyed in 2002 about the then-new golden dollar, 93 percent of those not using it gave familiarity with the dollar bill as a reason, and not wanting to carry more coins was another. Sixty-four percent opposed eliminating the dollar bill outright. Treasury and Federal Reserve officials have told GAO the same thing in plainer terms since: so long as the note and the coin circulate together, there is very little transactional demand for the coin, and the Reserve Banks sit on more than a billion dollar coins nobody is asking for.
The most useful number in that survey is the one that moved. Told that eliminating the bill could save the government about half a billion dollars a year, opposition fell from 64 percent to 37 percent and support rose from 17 percent to 55 percent. Public willingness was contingent on the savings — and GAO noted that it had not asked how people would feel if the same change produced a loss. On the best current federal estimate, it would. This proposal has to be argued on the merits of the system rather than on a windfall, because the windfall is the part that did not survive contact with the evidence.
The answer is not to argue people out of that preference. It is to give them a note one step up.
The United States already has the note it needs. The $2 Federal Reserve note is valid currency, already printed, already legal, requiring no new denomination and no new unit of account. What it lacks is ordinary circulation, and the production numbers show how completely it lacks it. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 order permitted production of as many as 416 million $2 notes. The 2026 order calls for none at all, reflecting existing inventory and demand. The same 2026 order calls for roughly 1.3 to 1.44 billion $1 notes.
A serious reform would invert those priorities. New $1 and $5 notes would stop being printed. Existing ones would stay valid and spendable indefinitely, but notes returning to the Federal Reserve would be withdrawn rather than sent back out. At the same time, enough $2 notes would be printed and distributed to make them genuinely ordinary.
There is one design change to the $2 note, and it preserves something the rest of this proposal would otherwise discard without deciding to. Washington’s portrait is on the $1, and retiring the $1 retires the portrait with it. The answer is to move it rather than lose it: retire the current $1 and $2 notes together, and reissue the $2 carrying Washington, in the green the note has always worn.
Then make it a rule rather than a one-time accommodation. The smallest note in circulation should always be a Washington note, and it should always be green. Green is not a gap in the color system; it is the fifth color in it, and the only one that requires no teaching. It is what Americans already read as money, and it belongs on the note at the bottom of the stack — the one reached for when there is nothing smaller in paper.
Two portraits leave paper money under this proposal, and the ledger should say so rather than let it happen quietly. Jefferson’s is displaced from the $2. Lincoln’s is retired with the $5, and that is the sharper loss, because the penny’s suspension has already ended production of the other coin that carried him. Whether either belongs on a redesigned $10 or $20 is a question for the design program rather than for this essay. It should be asked deliberately and not discovered afterward.
The target is normality, and it is worth being precise about what that excludes on both sides. Keeping $2 notes scarce would preserve exactly the novelty status that makes cashiers hesitate over them today. Flooding the country with them would simply install two $2 notes where two $1 notes used to sit and accomplish nothing. Normality means a cashier treats a $2 bill the way one now treats a $5: without comment. It means ATMs dispense them where useful, banks stock them, federal offices use them, and retailers receive them in routine change orders.
The bargain offered to the public is then easy to state. Paper money still starts at a small denomination. It starts at two dollars instead of one. Below that, coins do the work — and there are four of them instead of six.
Habit is what actually decides whether this works, and habit responds to design rather than to argument. A quarter feels like 25 cents because Americans have handled quarters for generations. A paper dollar feels more substantial than a dollar coin even though the two buy precisely the same things. Any successful conversion has to build new habits deliberately, and the way to do that is to keep continuity wherever continuity helps and to make change unmistakable wherever it does not. Keep the dime. Keep the quarter’s diameter, attached now to the half-dollar. Keep the golden dollar’s color. Keep the $2 note. Then make the new 20-cent piece rose and different at the edge, make the half-dollar black and unmistakable at arm’s length, and let the dollar remain the only gold coin in the pocket.
The remaining requirement is institutional nerve. Prior dollar coins were introduced tentatively, alongside the bill they were meant to replace, and the public correctly read the tentativeness as permission to ignore them. A person should not have to seek out a dollar coin or a $2 bill. Banks, ATMs, federal offices, and retailers should all encounter the new system at roughly the same moment, and the public should be taught relationships rather than specifications. Nobody needs to know about millimeters or electromagnetic signatures. They need to know that ten dimes, five 20-cent pieces, two halves, or one coin all make a dollar, and that two dollars is where paper begins.
The argument for retiring the $5 note is the argument already made for retiring the nickel, and the parallel is closer than analogy. It is the same four numbers. Set the $2 aside for a moment and the remaining bills are $10, $20, $50, and $100, which is the coin sequence exactly, scaled up by a hundred. If five cents has no place among coins of 10, 20, 50, and 100, then five dollars has no place among notes of 10, 20, 50, and 100. The reasoning cannot be sound in metal and unsound in paper.
What the $2 note contributes is a way to close the distance between the coins and the first ten dollars, which means the system runs on tens with twos filling in underneath. What that costs in arithmetic is small, and it is worth stating precisely rather than claiming too much for it. Above ten dollars the tens do the work; the $2 note fills only the remainder below, and that remainder never runs to more than four notes. An amount like $58.40 would be assembled as tens up to fifty, then two, four, six, eight, then two 20-cent coins — a run of twos that stops at eight and never crosses from one decade into the next. Dropping the $5 does not make arithmetic easier, and the case should not be made on that ground. It makes the system consistent, and the note left in its place is cheap to work with.
The rest follows from parity. Once the $1 note is gone and the $2 circulates normally, paper progresses by twos and a person paying with a train of notes finds no native stop at the five-dollar station. Every remaining note is an even number of dollars. Two-dollar notes alone can assemble any even sum: four make eight dollars, ten make twenty, twenty-five make fifty. But a sum of even numbers is always even, which means no combination of those notes produces five dollars, or fifteen, or any odd amount whatever. Retire the $1 note and the $5 becomes the only odd denomination left in American paper money.
Odd amounts would be settled from below instead, by notes and the dollar coin together: five dollars becomes two $2 notes and a coin, three dollars becomes one note and a coin. That is not free, and the cost belongs on the page with every other cost in this proposal. Across the range from one dollar to nine, a system that keeps the $5 note averages fewer than two pieces per amount, while a system without it averages nearly three.
But that cost is paid in paper rather than metal, and the difference matters. The case against multiplying coins rested on weight and bulk, and a few extra $2 bills in a wallet are not the burden that a few extra dollar coins in a pocket would be. What they buy is the thing the entire proposal exists for: four coins and four notes, every one of them 10, 20, 50, or 100, with a $2 note bridging the two scales.
The nickel and the $5 bill are the same denomination at different magnitudes. Retiring one while keeping the other would leave the job half finished.
Which leaves the notes themselves, and here the argument the coins have been making applies with more force and at less cost.
American paper money is uniform. Every denomination is the same size, and at a glance every denomination is the same color and the same design.
That “at a glance” is doing real work, and it is better dropped than leaned on. American notes have not been strictly one color since 2003, when the $20 acquired background tints of green, peach and blue. The $50 followed in 2004, the $10 in 2006, and the $5 in 2008. Treasury presented them as an aid to telling denominations apart, and they are a genuine improvement on what preceded them.
They are also not what anyone means by a colored banknote. A tint is a wash laid behind the engraving, visible in decent light to a person who is looking for it, and it does not change what color the note is. The courts have already weighed precisely that. The district court found United States currency in violation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in 2006, when the $20 and the $50 had been tinted for years; the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed in 2008, with the $10 tinted as well, holding that currency a blind person cannot readily identify denies that person meaningful access to the money of their own country. The district court ordered the Treasury to fix it by the next redesign. The tints were in circulation throughout. They were not the fix.
What the Bureau of Engraving and Printing proposed in answer deserves more attention than it gets, because it is most of this essay’s argument in the government’s own words. In May 2010 the Bureau published a three-part plan: a raised tactile feature on every denomination of the next redesign; large high-contrast numerals and distinct colors on every denomination it is permitted by law to alter; and a program distributing currency readers, free, to blind and visually impaired citizens. The Secretary of the Treasury approved it the following year.
Sixteen years on, one of the three is arriving. The Bureau has confirmed that every note in the coming series will carry a raised tactile feature, applied by intaglio printing, beginning with a $10 note expected to be production-ready in 2026.
That is the right remedy and it should be said so. It is also one element of three, from a plan the government wrote for itself sixteen years ago.
A raised feature serves a person who knows to feel for it. Color serves everyone else — the cashier at speed, the tourist, the person counting a drawer, the aging eye that no longer resolves small print. The survey in that case’s record put the American position starkly. Of 171 currency-issuing authorities counted in 1995, 167 gave each denomination its own color scheme, and exactly one printed bills identical in size and color across every denomination. The countries that keep their notes the same size prove that the two choices are independent: Canada’s notes are all 152.4 by 69.85 millimeters, and Canada nonetheless gives each denomination its own color and its own tactile mark.
That combination is the one the United States should adopt, because same-size notes are worth keeping. Uniform dimensions mean one paper size, one set of press and cutting tolerances, uniform ATM cassettes, uniform counting and sorting equipment, and wallets that already work. Differentiating by size would throw all of that away to buy something color and relief can buy more cheaply.
So: keep the size, change the color, and take the tactile feature that is already coming. The $2 note keeps its green, the anchor of the system and the one denomination Americans already recognize as unusual. The $10 becomes silver-grey, the $20 rose, the $50 black and the $100 gold.
The reason for those particular colors is that they are the coins. The dime is silver and the $10 is silver; the 20-cent piece is rose and the $20 is rose; the 50-cent piece is black and the $50 is black; the dollar coin is gold and the $100 is gold. The color follows the numeral rather than the amount, so the same four-color logic repeats two orders of magnitude apart, exactly as 10, 20, 50 and 100 repeat. Nobody can confuse a note with a coin, so the doubling costs nothing and teaches without instruction.
The word color has to be meant literally here, because the difference between this and what has already been done is the whole of the proposal. What is proposed is not a tint. It is that the entire printed face of the note carry the denomination’s color — engraving, borders, field, all of it. A $50 is a black bill. A $20 is a rose bill. None of that is a hard thing to print. The black 50-cent coin needed a paragraph of caution because a coin’s color is metallurgy — a plating with no circulating precedent, on a surface that wears. A note’s color is ink, and ink has been made in every color there is for as long as there have been banknotes. The two problems only look alike. Nobody has to look for the color or know where on the note to find it, and that is the point: a color that has to be sought is a color that fails at exactly the distance and in exactly the light where it was supposed to help.
That is also the answer to an objection the coin sections invite. Coins carry six independent identifiers, and this essay insisted that color arrive last among them. A note has fewer to work with. The size is uniform by choice, which leaves the printed numeral, the color, a relief that flattens, and the threads described below. Fewer channels means each one has to be worked harder, and coloring a corner of a note is not working it hard.
One denomination is missing from that list, and the reason it is missing is the reason the government’s own plan has a hole in it. The Bureau promised colors on every denomination it is permitted by law to alter. It is not permitted to alter the $1. Section 116 of the annual Financial Services appropriations act has forbidden redesigning the one-dollar note every year since 1999, on the stated grounds that redesign would cost too much, that vending and transit operators would object, and that the $1 is the least counterfeited note in circulation. The bills that preceded that rider were introduced in 1995 and 1997 under the candid title Save the Greenback Act, and their purpose was to stop the dollar bill being phased out in favor of the dollar coin.
So the most numerous note in the country — the one the 2026 print order calls for 1.3 to 1.44 billion of — is the single note the government has been barred from making accessible, and the bar exists because of the same argument this essay is having. Retiring the $1 note is usually defended as a precondition for the dollar coin. It is also the only way the Bureau’s 2010 plan is ever finished.
The mark itself deserves more thought than it usually gets, because the feature now on its way is the right idea in a material that will not hold it. Raised intaglio is printed relief, and printed relief flattens. It is the part of a banknote that wears first and hardest, on an object handled thousands of times by people who are not being careful with it. A mark placed in one corner carries a second problem, which is that corners are what tear off.
The more durable answer is already inside the note. American currency has carried an embedded security thread for decades — a band of polymer or metal, a millimeter or two wide and a few tens of microns thick, laid into the paper while the paper is being made. Nothing about it is exposed, so nothing about it can abrade. A narrower and thicker version of the same thread, made just proud enough of the surface to be felt, would give a mark that cannot wear off because there is nothing on the surface to wear away. It would stiffen the paper slightly along its line, which is likelier to resist a tear than to invite one. And it asks the Bureau to vary a component it already makes rather than to acquire a technique it does not have.
Then comes the requirement that decides the whole design, and it is the one usually forgotten. A torn note must still be identifiable. Half a bill is not a curiosity; it is an ordinary consequence of a wallet, a washing machine and a child. A sighted person can read a denomination off half a note without difficulty. A blind person holding a scheme whose marks all sat in the missing half has nothing at all.
So the pattern must be complete within each half of the note, and it must read the same from either end, which rules out any code that depends on knowing which way round the note is. What survives is the pair of judgments a hand makes most reliably: how many lines are there, and are they together or apart.
| Note | Threads in each half | What the finger reports |
|---|---|---|
| $2 | one | a single line |
| $10 | two, close together | a tight pair |
| $20 | two, far apart | a spread pair |
| $50 | three, evenly spaced | three lines, evenly spread |
| $100 | three, two of them paired | a pair and a single |
Nothing in that table asks anyone to count past three, which matters more than it looks: three parallel lines across half a note are comfortable to count by touch and five are not. Nor does it ask anyone to judge where on the note a mark sits, only how the marks sit relative to each other.
Two rules hold the scheme together. Every denomination carries at least one thread — not because threads wear, since embedded ones do not, but because a mark on every note is how a person who cannot see knows they are holding currency at all rather than a receipt. And the threads should be read one half at a time, since a whole note carries the pattern twice.
None of which argues for abandoning the raised feature arriving in 2026. It argues for putting a second, slower-failing system underneath it. Let the printed relief give the exact denomination while it lasts and the threads give it when the relief has gone, and a worn note degrades from precise to approximate instead of from precise to nothing. That is the same redundancy the coins are built on, applied to paper.
What this proposal cannot supply is a price. The Federal Reserve’s variable printing cost for a $1 or $2 note is about 4.1 cents, but no public figure breaks out what a security thread contributes to it, still less a second or a third. The honest position is that the principle is sound, the manufacturing is an extension of existing practice, and the cost is for the Bureau to establish rather than for an essay to invent.
None of this is free. Every denomination needs its own anti-counterfeiting design rather than one design in five printings, cash-handling equipment reads notes optically and would need recalibrating, and the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, so a color change is read abroad in a way a coin change is not. Those are real costs and they belong in the same ledger as the machine costs on the coin side. They are also the costs of finishing something a federal court ordered started in 2008.
Which raises the objection that will arrive first and loudest: nobody wants a pocket full of heavy dollar coins.
It deserves a straight answer. GAO’s surveys found exactly that resistance — not wanting to carry more coins was among the reasons people gave for leaving the golden dollar alone — and armored carriers separately warned GAO that moving from notes to coins would raise transportation costs because coins are heavier to haul. Part of the answer is that the proposed system needs fewer coins than the current one to settle the same amounts: four denominations instead of six, combining more efficiently, with the $2 note absorbing sums that would otherwise take several dollar coins. The rest of the answer has to come from engineering. The current half-dollar’s 11.34 grams is a historical artifact and indefensible for a coin meant for daily use. The golden dollar’s 8.1 grams is a starting point, not a sacred dimension. A wholesale redesign is precisely the occasion to ask how light each coin can safely be made, and that question has to be answered before any dimension is frozen into statute.
Currency reform is usually sold as a money-saving measure. This one should not be, because a good part of it would not save money, and the parts that would are smaller than the rhetoric usually suggests.
The penny is the clean case. The Mint projects that suspending circulating-penny production saves about $56 million a year in material costs, and that decision is already made.
The nickel is worse than the penny in the only way that matters. In fiscal 2025 the Mint spent 13.31 cents to produce and distribute a coin worth five, shipped roughly 615 million of them, and recorded approximately $50.9 million in negative seigniorage on the denomination. Seigniorage is the difference between what a coin is worth and what it costs to make — the government’s profit on money, when there is one. On nickels there has not been one for years. Ending nickel production ends that recurring loss, though it does not convert the full amount into federal savings, because replacement coin production and transition costs would consume some of it.
The dime and the quarter run the other way, and this is where the proposal costs money rather than saving it. In fiscal 2025 a quarter cost approximately 14.53 cents to produce and distribute; the Mint shipped about 1.24 billion of them and recorded roughly $130.5 million in seigniorage. Replacing the quarter with a 20-cent piece would reduce that. If the new coin cost about what a quarter costs to manufacture, the government would earn less on each one purely because the face value is lower. That is a real cost, it is a direct consequence of this proposal, and it should be stated plainly rather than buried. The existing half-dollar was also profitable in fiscal 2025 at a unit cost of about 27.81 cents, though on volumes small enough that the figure is nearly irrelevant. A rose-clad 20-cent piece and a black-finished half-dollar would both cost more to make than a plain clad disc, and until alloys, finishes and production processes have actually been tested, no one can honestly say by how much.
Then there is the dollar bill, where the case for reform has quietly collapsed and most advocates have not noticed.
For decades, proponents of the dollar coin could point to government studies concluding that coins would save enormous sums, on the reasoning that a coin lasts for decades while a note wears out in a year or two. That reasoning is out of date. The Federal Reserve now estimates the average life of a $1 note at about 7.2 years, following improvements in currency processing and recirculation, and puts the variable printing cost of a $1 or $2 note at roughly 4.1 cents in its 2025 budget. A note that lasts seven years and costs four cents is a formidable competitor.
The consequence showed up in 2019, when GAO’s comprehensive analysis became the first in its long series to conclude that replacing the $1 bill with a dollar coin would probably lose federal money rather than save it. GAO estimated a 30-year present-value loss of about $611 million under active replacement and about $2.6 billion under gradual replacement. Longer note life was a major reason; armored carriers’ higher transport costs were another. Those estimates are now several years old and would need updating before Congress acted on them, since coin compositions, interest rates, currency demand, and payment behavior have all moved. They also do not incorporate any savings, fiscal or physical, from the absence of the penny and the nickel.
The responsible conclusion follows directly. The dollar coin should not be sold on savings that the government’s own most recent comprehensive analysis does not support. It should be adopted because it completes a coherent denomination system, because it is durable, because it works well in automated transactions, and because eliminating the duplicate $1 format is the necessary condition for the coin ever circulating normally. If a fresh analysis eventually finds savings, that is a welcome bonus. It is not a premise, and it should not be manufactured in advance.
Retiring both the penny and the nickel makes the dime the smallest physical unit of cash, which raises the question that determines whether the public accepts any of this: what happens to a total that ends in seven cents?
Less than people fear, but the details have to be right. Prices do not have to be quoted in ten-cent increments. Electronic payments do not have to be rounded at all. Taxes and fees are still calculated to the cent. The only thing that needs adjusting is the final cash settlement, in the specific case where an exact amount cannot be paid with the coins that exist. Treasury is already applying that principle following the end of the penny, recommending that rounding occur only after duties, fees, and taxes have been calculated, and only for cash transactions that cannot be settled exactly. With a dime as the smallest coin, the principle is unchanged.
The mathematics deserves more care than it usually receives. Totals ending in one, two, three, or four cents round down; totals ending in six, seven, eight, or nine round up; totals ending in zero need nothing. Five cents sits exactly halfway, and how that case is handled is the whole argument.
The schoolroom rule — always round five up — is not neutral. If final cent digits are evenly distributed, it produces an average upward adjustment of half a cent per cash transaction, every transaction, permanently in the seller’s favor. That is a small number attached to a very large number of transactions, and it is precisely the sort of quiet asymmetry that erodes public trust in a currency change.
Two defensible alternatives exist. The mathematically neutral one is round-half-to-even: a total sitting exactly between two dimes goes to the one whose dime digit is even, so that $10.25 becomes $10.20 while $10.35 becomes $10.40. Over many transactions the tie cases cancel instead of accumulating. The simpler and more political option is to round exact five-cent ties down, in the customer’s favor, which gives up mathematical neutrality in exchange for an asymmetry that no one will complain about. Either is more defensible than adopting an upward rule and hoping nobody runs the numbers.
Point-of-sale systems can handle this automatically and, more importantly, can show it:
Exact total: $18.37 Cash rounding: +$0.03 Cash due: $18.40
The same purchase paid by card remains $18.37. A public education campaign built on trust us, it works out on average invites exactly the suspicion it is trying to prevent. A receipt line that shows the adjustment every time does not.
International experience is reassuring but should not be oversold. Australia withdrew its one- and two-cent coins in 1992, and New Zealand did the same; reviewing those precedents before retiring its own penny, the Canadian government recorded that New Zealand’s removal had no noticeable effect on inflation, consistent with a 2005 Bank of Canada study of the question. Those cases do not prove that rounding to ten cents in an economy the size of America’s would behave the same way, because the increment is larger and the economy is not comparable. The distributional effects should be modeled before implementation and audited afterward rather than assumed.
That last point matters more than it may appear, because cash use is not evenly distributed. The Federal Reserve’s 2026 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice found that cash accounted for about 13 percent of consumer payments while roughly 80 percent of adults reported making at least one cash payment in the preceding month, with usage concentrated among older and lower-income households and among rural ones. A rounding rule that quietly favors sellers is not a rounding error to the people who use cash for most of what they buy. Cash is a public payment system, and it should be designed like one.
Stopping production is the easy half. Getting hundreds of billions of existing coins and notes out of daily commerce is the half that actually requires a plan — and the first thing the plan has to accept is that total recovery is neither achievable nor necessary.
Collectors will collect. Children will keep jars of old quarters. Somebody will find a dollar bill in a library book in 2075. None of that matters, because the objective was never physical extinction. It is to remove enough old money from active circulation that the new system becomes the default, and the banking system is well equipped to do that without anyone confiscating anything.
Banks and other depository institutions would be the main drain. When pennies, nickels, quarters, old half-dollars, $1 notes, or $5 notes come in on deposit, institutions would segregate them rather than order them back into working inventory, and Federal Reserve processing would do the same. Large retailers, who move enormous volumes of cash through banks and armored carriers, would find their own drawers converting naturally once their change orders contained only new denominations. Small businesses need not be enlisted as currency police; it is enough that they make change with new money when they can and deposit accumulated legacy coins rather than handing them back out. Federal agencies and post offices would accept old money throughout and dispense only new.
For individuals the message can be one sentence: spend it or deposit it, and it is still worth exactly what it says. Banks could be required during the transition to accept retired denominations at face value, subject to sensible bulk-handling rules, and temporary waivers of consumer coin-counting fees would encourage the process without paying anyone a premium. No premium is needed. Neither is an expiration date, and neither is any threat of confiscation.
Legal tender is the point where this usually snags, and the snag is largely imaginary. Federal law makes United States coins and currency legal tender for debts, public charges, taxes, and dues, and Americans reasonably attach weight to that phrase. But it has never created a general federal requirement that every private seller accept every denomination of cash in every transaction. The Federal Reserve has repeatedly explained that, absent a contrary state law, private businesses may generally set their own policies on accepting cash.
That distinction gives a transition far more room than is commonly assumed. Congress could leave legacy coins and notes legal tender — preserving their value permanently — while expressly authorizing merchants to decline retired denominations in new retail transactions after an announced date, which would also resolve any conflict with state cash-acceptance laws. Banks and government would remain redemption points indefinitely. Someone who finds an old quarter in 2045 has not lost the money; the bank will still take it. A vending machine, however, need not, and no merchant should have to maintain an obsolete coin tube for the convenience of someone spending a roll of nickels.
Congress would have to act for any of this to happen, and its role should be carefully bounded. Section 5112 of Title 31 currently specifies the 25-cent quarter, the 30.61-millimeter half-dollar, the dime, the nickel, and the rest, so authorizing a 20-cent denomination and altering the half-dollar are legislative acts, not administrative ones. But the statute should define denominations, accessibility requirements, redemption rules, and transition authority while leaving Treasury and the Mint enough technical latitude to improve compositions as materials and machine technology evolve. Alloy selection is a genuine engineering problem involving durability, suppliers, manufacturing tolerances, recyclability, electromagnetic properties, and the installed base of equipment. The Mint’s 2024 report to Congress makes the case better than argument can. It identified 80/20 cupronickel as an alternative that had completed testing for the five-cent piece, the dime, the quarter and the half-dollar, that would be seamless for existing coin-handling equipment, and that is waiting on nothing but an act of Congress and roughly a year of validation. A cheaper alloy that no machine in the country would notice has been sitting finished on a shelf while the statute that would permit it goes unwritten. That is not the kind of decision that belongs in statutory text.
The sequence itself is straightforward. Production of nickels, quarters, old-style half-dollars, $1 notes, and $5 notes ends on a fixed date; the penny has already crossed that line and the dime continues throughout. New 20-cent and 50-cent coins are struck in volume well before release so that banks open with adequate inventory, dollar-coin production rises to meet expected demand, and the Federal Reserve builds a stock of $2 notes. On an announced conversion date, banks begin distributing the new set, and from that point the system runs in one direction: new currency out, old currency back and withdrawn. Machines are converted and, once converted, stop accepting retired coins. Both systems remain usable during an overlap period wherever merchants choose to accept them.
Countries have done considerably harder things than this. New Zealand converted to decimal currency in 1967 with a national campaign of newspaper advertising, household pamphlets, business training, and school materials; the Reserve Bank of New Zealand records that more than 50,000 cash registers had to be converted and 165 million new coins produced. What is proposed here is far less disruptive. A dollar would still be a dollar. Prices would still be quoted in dollars and cents. Bank balances, contracts, and electronic accounting would not change at all. Only the physical objects representing small amounts would be different.
This is not a free lunch and should not be presented as one.
The Mint would absorb design, tooling, testing, and startup costs. Banks would need new sorting and storage arrangements. Vending and coin-operated equipment would need modification, some of it expensive and some of it borne by small operators who did not ask for any of this. Retailers would retrain staff and update drawers and point-of-sale systems. Armored transport would get heavier. On the paper side the Bureau would run a design program for every surviving denomination rather than one design in five printings; the optical readers in every note-handling machine in the country would need recalibrating for colors they have never seen; the $2 would need a new plate to carry Washington; and a color change to the world’s reserve currency is read abroad in a way a coin change is not. The rose cladding and the black finish would both cost more than a plain clad disc, and the black finish appears to have no precedent in circulating coinage anywhere. The government would give up profitable quarter seigniorage and might, on the most recent comprehensive federal analysis, take a long-term fiscal loss by substituting dollar coins for notes that now last seven years. Millions of people would have to learn unfamiliar coins, and some of them will resent losing the quarter for no reason more complicated than having used one their whole lives.
Those are serious objections and none of them is answered by enthusiasm.
What sits on the other side of the ledger is a system rather than a collection of savings. The country would stop manufacturing a nickel that costs more than twice its face value. Physical currency would shrink from six coin denominations to four, each with an obvious relationship to a dollar, and paper would shrink to four notes standing on that same sequence with the $2 beneath them, the whole of cash running on twos and tens. The half-dollar, which barely circulates today, would have work to do again. The dollar coin would finally have a reason to exist, because the note competing with it would be gone. The $2 bill would stop being a curiosity and become a denomination. Cash rounding would eliminate the need to manufacture or distribute one- and five-cent pieces while electronic accounting stayed exact to the cent. Modern alloys could reduce weight and possibly cost. And the machines that handle American coins would finally be built around a stable, rational denomination set instead of successive layers of historical compromise.
There is an irony in the argument that physical currency is not worth modernizing because fewer people use it. Cash use has declined substantially, and the Federal Reserve’s own data show both halves of the picture at once: a minority of payments, and an overwhelming majority of adults who still use it at least occasionally. It works without a battery, without a network, and without a bank account. It passes directly from one person to another. It keeps working through some electronic outages. Children understand it. It carries a degree of privacy that no electronic instrument fully reproduces, and it puts the payment instrument physically in the hands of the person who owns it.
Keeping an inefficient set of denominations out of nostalgia preserves none of it. That is neglect, and the end of the penny is the rare moment when the country is already reconsidering the assumption that a coin must exist forever merely because it existed yesterday.
The alternative to redesigning the system is not stability. It is losing cash one denomination at a time, by attrition, until what remains is too incoherent to defend — a path the country can end up following without ever deciding to take it.
The strongest case for a 10/20/50/100 system in both metal and paper, bridged by a $2 note, is not that any component of it produces a Treasury windfall. Several plainly do not, and saying otherwise would forfeit the argument at the first hearing. The case is that it makes sense as a system, which is more than can be said for what Americans carry today.
The United States has already decided that a coin can outlive its usefulness. The harder decision, and the one still outstanding, is what useful coinage and paper would actually look like.
The quantitative claims in this essay are drawn from official or government-accountability sources.
The United States Mint 2025 Annual Report reports production-and-distribution costs of approximately 3.02 cents for the penny, 13.31 cents for the nickel, 6.77 cents for the dime, 14.53 cents for the quarter, and 27.81 cents for the half-dollar, together with the shipment and seigniorage figures cited above.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Penny Production Cessation FAQ of December 23, 2025 confirms the suspension of circulating-penny production, the continued legal-tender status of existing pennies, the Mint’s projection of approximately $56 million in annual savings on materials, continued recirculation of existing pennies by the Federal Reserve, and current federal guidance on cash rounding. That guidance is explicitly non-binding.
Federal Reserve currency-production data place the 2025 variable printing cost of a $1 or $2 note at approximately 4.1 cents and the average life of a $1 note at about 7.2 years as of May 2025.
The Federal Reserve’s 2026 print order calls for approximately 1.3 to 1.44 billion $1 notes and no new $2 notes, reflecting existing inventory and demand rather than any question about the $2 denomination.
GAO-19-300 (2019) estimated that replacing the $1 note with a $1 coin would produce a 30-year present-value government loss of approximately $611 million under active replacement or approximately $2.6 billion under gradual replacement. These figures should be updated before any legislation, but they are GAO’s most recent comprehensive estimates and they contradict older claims that a dollar-coin conversion necessarily saves the government money. The same report records that Reserve Banks hold more than a billion $1 coins for want of demand, and attributes to Federal Reserve officials the observation that the public keeps choosing the note while both circulate.
The survey figures on public attitudes come from GAO-03-206 (2002), U.S. Coins: Public Views on Changing Coin Design, conducted for GAO by the Gallup Organization: 93 percent of respondents not using the golden dollar cited familiarity with the dollar bill, 64 percent opposed eliminating the dollar bill, and that opposition fell to 37 percent when annual government savings of about half a billion dollars were mentioned. The suggestion that a dollar coin be made harder to confuse with the quarter comes from participants in that study’s focus groups rather than from a GAO recommendation. GAO-19-300 notes that it did not survey public attitudes toward the same change if it produced a loss rather than a saving.
GAO-16-177 (2015, released 2016), U.S. Coins: Implications of Changing Metal Compositions, reported estimates from six industry associations of $2.4 billion to $10 billion to modify some 21.9 million coin-acceptance machines under certain steel-coin scenarios, and explained why it considered those estimates probably overstated — including the vending industry’s assumption of seven million machines against a 2015 industry estimate of about 4.5 million. Two of GAO’s three reasons for that discount assumed facts this proposal changes: that coin dimensions would stay the same, and that the quarter would survive. The discount is quoted here with that limit stated in the text.
The U.S. Mint’s 2012 alternative-metals study, prepared by Concurrent Technologies Corporation, estimated one-time U.S. stakeholder equipment costs of $277 million to $375 million for non-ferromagnetic materials carrying an altered electromagnetic signature, and $531 million to $632 million for ferromagnetic materials. Those figures concern changes of alloy rather than bimetallic construction, and are cited solely as evidence of the potential scale of machine-compatibility costs. They are not an estimate of either the manufacturing cost or the equipment cost of the 50-cent coin proposed here. The Mint’s separate research into a bimetallic five-cent coin, reported in its 2014 biennial report to Congress, found a capital-cost premium of approximately $0.0066 per coin and recommended bimetallic construction at face values of one dollar and above.
Current federal coin specifications are established in 31 U.S.C. § 5112, which is why authorizing the proposed 20-cent coin and altering the half-dollar would require congressional action. The legal-tender provision cited in Part VII is 31 U.S.C. § 5103; guidance that private businesses may generally set their own cash-acceptance policies absent a contrary state law comes from the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve’s 2026 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice reports that cash accounted for about 13 percent of consumer payments while roughly four adults in five reported using cash at least once in the preceding month, and reports greater cash usage among consumers aged 55 and over, among households earning under $25,000 a year, and among rural consumers.
The security thread already embedded in United States currency is a band of polymer or metal laid into the paper during manufacture. Banknote security threads generally run 0.5 to 2 millimeters wide and 12 to 50 microns thick; no public figure gives the dimensions of the American one. The thicker, narrower, palpable version proposed here, and the denominational patterns built from it, are this essay’s proposal and not a description of anything in production. No public figure breaks out what a security thread contributes to the cost of a note.
The accessibility findings on paper money come from American Council of the Blind v. Paulson, 525 F.3d 1256 (D.C. Cir. 2008), in which the Court of Appeals affirmed that uniform United States currency violates Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act by denying blind people meaningful access, and from the district court’s October 2008 order directing a remedy by the next redesign. The count of 171 currency-issuing authorities, of which 167 used denominational color schemes and one did not, is from a 1995 National Research Council report quoted in that opinion; it is cited here with its date because it is three decades old. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s confirmation that raised tactile features will appear on every denomination of the coming series, beginning with a $10 note production-ready in 2026, is the Bureau’s own. The Bank of Canada describes its tactile feature — raised dot clusters whose count and spacing vary by denomination, developed with blind Canadians and deliberately not Braille — alongside distinct colors and large high-contrast numerals; Canadian notes are uniform in size at 152.4 by 69.85 millimeters.
The background tints on current notes were introduced denomination by denomination — the $20 in 2003, the $50 in 2004, the $10 in 2006 and the $5 in 2008 — and Treasury presented them at the time as an aid to distinguishing denominations. The chronology matters to the argument made here: the district court found United States currency in violation in 2006 and the Court of Appeals affirmed in 2008, so the tints were already circulating when the currency was held inaccessible.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s three-part meaningful-access plan — a raised tactile feature, large high-contrast numerals and distinct colors on each denomination it is permitted by law to alter, and a currency reader distribution program — was published in May 2010 in response to the injunction, and approved by the Secretary of the Treasury in 2011. The proposal in this essay departs from it in one respect, stated in the text: the Bureau’s colors are applied to portions of a note, and the colors proposed here are the color of the whole printed face.
The prohibition on redesigning the $1 note is Section 116 of the annual Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, first enacted in 1999 and renewed each year since. The grounds recorded for it are the cost of redesign, anticipated objections from vending and transit operators, and the $1’s status as the least counterfeited denomination — not the portrait it carries, and this essay does not assert otherwise. Its legislative antecedents are the Save the Greenback Act bills of 1995 and 1997, which would have barred phasing out the $1 note in favor of the $1 coin and did not pass. Current portraits are Washington on the $1, Jefferson on the $2 and Lincoln on the $5.
The Royal Canadian Mint issued the world’s first colored circulation coin in October 2004. The Lincoln cent has been copper-plated zinc since 1982. Neither fact is offered as an estimate of what a rose cladding or a black finish would cost.
The Government of Canada’s Budget 2012 backgrounder on withdrawing the penny records that New Zealand’s removal of its one- and two-cent coins had no noticeable effect on inflation, consistent with a 2005 Bank of Canada study of penny elimination; it notes Australia’s 1992 withdrawal without reporting an inflation finding for it. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand records that the 1967 decimal conversion required more than 50,000 cash registers to be converted and 165 million new coins to be produced. The U.S. Mint’s 2024 Biennial Report to Congress as Required by the Coin Modernization, Oversight, and Continuity Act identified 80/20 cupronickel as an alternative that had completed testing for the five-cent, dime, quarter and half-dollar denominations and would be seamless for existing equipment.
The description of how electronic coin validators identify coins — by combinations of dimensions, mass, and electromagnetic properties — and the account in Part III of how older size-and-weight machines would treat coins reusing a retired diameter are general statements about coin-handling equipment rather than claims drawn from a specific published study.
Copyright © 2026 Jay Pscot. All rights reserved.
Contact & Corrections: editor@pscot.com
Website: www.pscot.com