Federal Reserve Inventories of $1 Coins at 1.105 Billion

The United States continues to store a lot of $1 coins in vaults, according to Federal Reserve data released in September.

Reserve Bank inventories of dollars were at 1.105 billion coins through the second quarter of 2019 after peaking to 1.440 billion coins in the third quarter of 2012.

They have trended lower since that peak by about 4.1 million coins per month, indicating that there are enough dollars stored away to last over two decades.

Most are Presidential $1 coins. As directed by Public Law 109-145, the United States Mint produced them in commemoration of former American presidents from 2007 to 2016.

The public preferred paper money over clad dollars, and inventories of $1 coins resultantly surged by as much as 298 million a year. The trajectory had Fed officials talking about adding storage facilities.

The build-up was eventually checked after Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner halted $1 coin production for commerce in December 2011 when the stockpile had reached 1.42 billion coins.

Today, the United States Mint continues to strike clad $1 coins but only for collectible products that are sold to the public. These include one a year bearing a design honoring the important contributions made by Indian tribes and individual Native Americans and four a year featuring designs celebrating American innovation. In 2019, the U.S. Mint will strike about 11 million of these coins for collectors.

As a comparison to the most Fed ordered U.S. denomination for circulation, the U.S Mint produced over 3.8 billion cents in the first half of this year alone.