The Rarest and Most Valuable Coins in the World

The most expensive coin ever sold at auction is a $20 gold piece that was never supposed to leave the Mint. In June 2021 a single 1933 double eagle sold for $18,872,250 in New York.

Rare isn't the same as valuable. Some coins with only one known example sell for less than a nice used car. The coins on this list have both: hardly any survive, and collectors have fought over them for a century or more. Each one also comes with a story about a melting pot, a diplomat's gift case or a court case.

Here are the coins behind the biggest public auction records, with the date, the auction house and the price for each.

How we ranked them

We used prices realised at public auction, including the buyer's premium, because those are published and anyone can check them. Private sales are often bigger, but the price usually comes from the seller or the dealer, so we mention them only in passing.

Prices are in US dollars at the time of sale. Sales in pounds or yuan are converted at the rate the auction house or the coin press reported at the time.

1. The 1933 double eagle: $18.87 million

Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 8 June 2021 · Coin page: Double eagle

In 1933 the Philadelphia Mint struck 445,500 double eagles. Then President Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard, and none of them were ever issued. The Mint melted them down in 1937. It kept two for the national collection, and they're now in the Smithsonian.

A few got out first, probably smuggled out of the Mint, and the Secret Service spent years tracking them down. By the 1950s it had seized ten and melted them. One slipped through. In 1944 the Treasury mistakenly granted an export licence for a 1933 double eagle bought by King Farouk of Egypt. After Farouk was overthrown in 1952 the coin vanished, and it only turned up again in 1996, when federal agents arrested a British dealer trying to sell it at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York.

The government and the dealer settled. The coin was sold at Sotheby's and Stack's in 2002 for $7,590,020, with the proceeds split between the dealer and the US Treasury. The extra $20 paid the coin's face value, which "monetised" it and made it the only 1933 double eagle anyone can legally own. Shoe designer Stuart Weitzman bought it. When he sold it in 2021, the price more than doubled.

There's a postscript. In 2004 a Philadelphia family handed ten more 1933 double eagles to the Mint for authentication. The Mint kept them. A federal appeals court ruled in 2016 that they were government property, and in 2017 the Supreme Court declined to hear the family's appeal.

Read more: The Double Eagle and the Gold Recall of 1933

2. The 1794 Flowing Hair dollar: $10.02 million

Sold: Stack's Bowers, New York, 24 January 2013 · Coin page: US dollar coin

This is the first silver dollar the United States ever made. The Mint struck its first dollars on 15 October 1794 and made only 1,758 that year.

The record coin is special even among those. It has a sharp, carefully struck finish that suggests it was made as a presentation piece, and many specialists think it may be the very first dollar struck. It was the first coin ever to sell for more than $10 million at auction. In January 2022 it changed hands again in a private sale, reportedly for $12 million.

Read more: The Coinage Act of 1792 and the Birth of the US Mint

3. The 1787 Brasher doubloon: $9.36 million

Sold: Heritage Auctions, 21 January 2021 · Coin page: Doubloon

Before the US Mint existed, private craftsmen filled the gap. Ephraim Brasher was a New York goldsmith who, in 1787, asked the state for permission to make copper coins. New York said no. He struck a handful of gold coins anyway, made from melted foreign gold, with an eagle on one side and a rising sun on the other.

Brasher stamped his initials, EB, on the coins as a mark of quality. On most of them the punch sits on the eagle's wing. Only a few of these "New York style" doubloons are known.

At the time, the 2021 sale was the highest price ever paid for a gold coin at auction. Heritage said the buyer had never bought a rare coin before.

Read more: Colonial Coins and Continental Currency · The Doubloon: Spanish Gold and Pirate Legend

4. The 1822 half eagle: $8.4 million

Sold: Stack's Bowers, Las Vegas, 25 March 2021

Mint records say 17,796 half eagles were struck in 1822. Only three are known today, and two of those are in the Smithsonian.

The rest were almost certainly melted. In the early 1820s the gold in a $5 coin was worth about $6. That made the coins worth more as metal than as money, so many were exported and melted down in Europe. The one in private hands spent nearly 40 years in the collection of D. Brent Pogue, who bought it in 1982.

5. The 1804 silver dollar: $7.68 million

Sold: Stack's Bowers, ANA World's Fair of Money, August 2021 · Coin page: US dollar coin

Collectors call it "the King of American Coins," and it wasn't struck in 1804. Mint records show 19,570 dollars made that year, but those coins carried earlier dates. The coins dated 1804 were made in the 1830s, for sets of proof coins that the US envoy Edmund Roberts gave as diplomatic gifts in Asia.

The record coin was in one of those sets. Roberts presented it to the Sultan of Muscat in 1835, along with a treaty of friendship. About 15 1804 dollars are known. Only eight are originals like this one. The others were restrikes, made decades later for collectors.

Read more: America's Classic Silver Dollars: Morgan, Peace and Trade

6. The 1861 Paquet double eagle: $7.2 million

Sold: Heritage Auctions, August 2021 · Coin page: Double eagle

In 1861 Mint engraver Anthony Paquet redesigned the back of the $20 coin with taller, thinner lettering. Mint Director James Snowden soon recalled the coins and ordered them melted. Only two of the Philadelphia coins survived. The finer one set this record. The other sold for $1,645,000 in 2014.

7. The 1903 Fengtien tael: $6.9 million

Sold: Beijing Chengxuan Auction, August 2022

The most valuable Chinese coin ever sold is a silver pattern from Fengtien province (now Liaoning), struck in 1903 at the Mukden mint. A "tael" was a Chinese unit of silver weight. The coin is a pattern, a trial striking for a proposed new coin, and only one or two were made. It sold for 46,575,000 yuan, nearly $2 million above its insurance estimate.

8. The 723 Umayyad gold dinar: £3.72 million (about $6 million)

Sold: Morton & Eden, London, April 2011

This gold dinar was struck in the year 105 of the Islamic calendar (AD 723) under the Umayyad caliphs. One short line of Arabic makes it special: ma'dan amir al-mu'minin, "mine of the Commander of the Faithful." It says the gold came from a mine owned by the caliph himself, which scholars have identified as Ma'din Bani Sulaim, near Mecca.

About a dozen are known. When it sold in 2011 it set a record for any Islamic coin, and for any coin sold at auction in Europe.

The record that was undone: Brutus's Ides of March aureus

Sold: Roma Numismatics, London, October 2020 · Coin page: Aureus

In October 2020 a gold aureus of Brutus sold in London for £3.24 million, about $4.2 million. That was then a record for any ancient coin. Brutus struck the coin in 43 or 42 BC to celebrate the murder of Julius Caesar. One side shows his portrait. The other shows a cap of liberty between two daggers, over the words EID MAR, the Ides of March. Only three gold examples are known.

The record didn't hold up. In 2023 the Manhattan District Attorney's office seized the coin and returned it to Greece, saying it had been looted and sold with a forged ownership history. The auction house's owner was charged in New York.

Read more: The Denarius: How Rome's Silver Coin Lost Its Shine

The rarest coins you can't buy

Some of the rarest coins in the world will never come up for sale.

• The 1849 double eagle. The first $20 gold coin, a trial piece struck during the California Gold Rush. It's unique, and it's in the Smithsonian.
• The other 1933 double eagles. Two in the Smithsonian and the ten from the Philadelphia family, all government property.
• The 1822 half eagles. Two of the three survivors are in the Smithsonian.
• The Big Maple Leaf. In 2007 the Royal Canadian Mint made a handful of 100-kilogram coins of 99.999% pure gold, each with a face value of a million Canadian dollars. One was on loan to the Bode Museum in Berlin when thieves broke in on 27 March 2017 and carried it off. Three men were convicted in 2020. The coin has never been found. Investigators believe it was cut up and sold as scrap gold.

Could one be in your pocket change?

Almost certainly not, but there's one famous near-miss. In 1943 US cents were made of zinc-coated steel to save copper for the war. A few were struck by mistake on leftover bronze blanks. The only one known from the Denver Mint sold for $840,000 at Heritage in January 2021.

Most copper-coloured 1943 cents you'll see are fakes, usually steel cents plated with copper or altered 1948 cents. A magnet is the quick test: a genuine bronze cent won't stick.

Read more: The History of the Penny

So what makes a coin valuable?

Look at the list again and the same few things come up. Almost every coin here was supposed to be destroyed, or almost was: melted for its gold, recalled, or never issued. Each has a paper trail that collectors trust, and the Eid Mar aureus shows what happens when that trail turns out to be forged. And each has a story people want to own.

You can't own the 1933 double eagle, but you can flip one on screen. Or go back to the main coin flip.