1956 Canadian Penny

Quick answers

Is the 1956 Canadian Penny rare?

No. 78.7 million were made, so circulated examples are worth face value.

How many 1956 Canadian pennies were made?

78,685,535 were struck for circulation.

What is the 1956 Canadian Penny made of?

Bronze (98% copper, 0.5% tin, 1.5% zinc). It weighs 3.24 g and measures 19.05 mm.

Is the 1956 Canadian Penny still legal tender?

Yes. The Royal Canadian Mint stopped distributing cents in 2013, but they remain legal tender. Cash payments are rounded to the nearest five cents, so most pennies now sit in jars or go to banks.

How to recognize it

The 1956 Canadian Penny is round, 19.05 mm across and bronze (98% copper, 0.5% tin, 1.5% zinc).

1956 Canadian Penny by the numbers

Measured by how many were made, the 1956 Canadian Penny ranks 85th lowest of 151 Canadian cent dates and varieties from 1858 to 2012. The next scarcer is the 1945 Canadian Penny (77.3 million); the next more common is the 1951 Canadian Penny (80.4 million).

For scale, the most common is the 1981 Round Canadian Penny with 1.21 billion, about 15 times as many. The scarcest is the 1858 Canadian Penny with 421,000, 187 times fewer than this one.

Compared with the dates around it, the 1956 output was 1.4 times the 1955 figure and 1.3 times fewer than 1957.

Over the 1950s the Mint produced 677.2 million cents across 10 dates and varieties; the 1956 Canadian Penny accounts for 12% of that.

What to check on your 1956 Canadian Penny

• Check the color. Collectors describe copper cents as red, red-brown or brown; original red color is worth far more than toned or dull surfaces.
• Never clean it. Rubbing, polishing or dipping leaves fine scratches and an unnatural color that collectors spot at once.

Elizabeth II laureate portrait, 1953 to 1964

Elizabeth II's first Canadian portrait, by Mary Gillick, shows a young queen with a laurel wreath in her hair and no crown, with the legend ELIZABETH II DEI GRATIA REGINA. Kruger Gray's maple twig reverse carried on unchanged. The coin itself stayed at 19.05 mm and 3.24 g in the wartime alloy of 98% copper, 0.5% tin and 1.5% zinc. The portrait was first cut in high relief, which turned out to cause problems at the mint.

The first 1953 dies did not strike cleanly, with weak detail in the legend and around the rim. The mint revised the master and the easiest way to tell the versions apart is the gown: the revised portrait shows a clear fold line running across the shoulder, while the original has none. Both appear on 1953 cents under one published mintage. In 1955 an old die without the fold was used again, producing the scarce 1955 no shoulder fold cent. Mintages climbed steadily through the decade, passing 100 million in 1957 and reaching about 485 million in 1964.

The shoulder is the thing to check on any 1953 or 1955 cent. Use a magnifier and good light and look at the line of the gown just above the bust's lower edge. Heavy wear can erase a weak fold, so judge varieties on reasonably sharp coins. Apart from those, the dates here are common, though 1954 had a much smaller run of about 22 million. Mint state red coins from this era are easy to find, so worn examples of regular dates are face value coins.

Mintage chart

Specifications