Are new UK £1 coins dated 2016 rare or valuable?

Rumours are spreading across the Internet concerning the new £1, claiming that many of these coins are actually worth more than 100 pennies.

So prolific are the rumours that many have listed the coins for auction on sites like eBay, with many (questionably) reaching bids of many hundreds or thousands of pounds. (We say questionably as there is reason to suspect many of those auctions received fake bids to drive up the price.) The confusion hasn’t been helped by many inaccurate press reports on the issue.

Two rumours seem to be spreading –

1. That £1 coins bearing the 2016 date are especially valuable, since the coin was officially introduced in 2017.
2. That £1 trial coins, issued to retailers prior to the official release of the coin and dated 2015, are especially valuable.

Both rumours are misleading (or false) though we’ll go into more details below.

Firstly the claim that coins dated 2016 are rare or valuable is certainly false. In fact at the time of the official release in March 2017, nearly all the coins were dated 2016. The Royal Mint confirmed that there are in fact over half a billion coins dated 2016 since a high volume of coins had to have finished production prior to the official release date.

As such, many coins were produced in 2016, and since there are half a billion of them, there is no real collector value to them.

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Secondly, there were a number of “trial coins” – marked TRIAL – that were released prior to the official release in March 2017 but were not considered legal tender. There has been a lot of confusion over what this trial coin will actually be worth.

Much of this confusion is down to a similar trial in the 1990s when The Royal Mint did a trial run for the then-new £2 coin. Just over 4,500 of these £2 coins were introduced in 1994, and eventually this trial coin became a collectible, typically fetching between £100 to £300.

As such, many have expected the trial £1 coin to eventually reach a similar value. However a coin’s value is primarily rooted in its rarity, and over 200,000 trial £1 coins were released to retailers (in comparison to the considerably smaller 4,500 £2 coins) so if you’re expecting the trial £1 coin to fetch a similar amount to the trial £2 coin, you may be disappointed. The trial £1 coin’s exact value will be determined in time.

Of course this hasn’t stopped many trying to sell the coins on the Internet and some people – from what we hear – have had some success. If you can sell the coin, then of course, go ahead. But if you’re looking to buy a £1 coin for hundreds of pounds, we’d recommend reconsidering.

So are any £1 coins actually valuable?

As with any other coin, it is imperfections or mistakes that arose during the production process that are ultimately worth money. So checking the coin for these is what we’d recommend doing.