What does Low Mintage mean? How do you figure out if an Australian Coin is Rare or Scarce?

This video will take you through how to identify low mintage coins for your Australian coin collection.
For information about ALL the coins in circulation, check out the Pirate Guide:
https://australiacoins.org/PrintedBook

Let's step back in time for a second to a simpler time... 2019

There are many reasons people collect coins. But one of the most common is to find coins that they consider scarce (or even rare).

Why? The law of supply and demand tells us that if something is hard to find, it's more likely to be considered valuable. The more scarce a coin is, the more valuable it should be. This is not always the case of course, but it's a big factor in whether a coin will be worth more than face value.

How do we know which coins are scarce?

Step 1: you need to know the mintage for each coin - in other words how many coins were produced each year.

Step 2: you need to know how each mintage compares to other years, so you can confirm which year has the lowest mintage.

How do you find out the mintage? The Mint makes this easy - they release these numbers once a year in their annual report.

They just release their 2019/2020 report a few weeks back, and they add the mintages for the circulated coins on their website.

What makes 2019 unusual is that there were so many different coins in 2019. Moreso, many of these coins would be considered low mintage in any regular year.

With so many low mintage coins in one year, I thought it was worth looking at you can figure out whether a coin is low mintage.

There are different ways of deciding on low mintage, so you need to confirm what works for you, and then it's easier to make more sense of the 2019 coin mintages.

If you look at five cent coins, the lowest ever mintage for a five cent coin is just under 5 million. So that means that you could consider a five cent with a mintage of 4 million (like we had in 2019) to be low mintage.

Compare that to the two dollar coin. Most of the special design coins for the two dollar coin have a mintage of around 2 million.


So we need mintages to confirm how many of each coin were produced in a given year, but we need to compare this to other mintages for comparable coins to confirm what counts as low mintage.

Once we've got these for previous years, we're ready to start assessing the 2019 coins to confirm which ones you want to keep.

See you in the next video to start going through these details.


Coin images used with permission from the Royal Australian Mint (9/45/360)