How Many Coin Collectors Are There?
Dennis: How many coin collectors are there in the United States? This numismatic puzzle is like Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical rumination, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Estimates range from thousands to millions.
I think the answer boils down to how you define “collector.”
Yes, one hundred and twenty-five million!
In 2001 the nation’s adult population (18 years or older) was about 258 million. In other words, by the Mint’s definition, every other grownup was a coin collector.
The State quarters were definitely hot in 2001, making national headlines and generating a lot of excitement. Harris (and later Whitman, as well as other manufacturers) sold folders, albums, maps, and other State quarter products by the hundreds of thousands. Many Americans were bitten by “the coin bug” and wanted to collect one of every quarter dollar in the program. We can imagine even more people just looking for their birth states, or their favorite vacation states, or saving coins with animals or flowers or other personal interests.
If you consider each of those people a “coin collector”—whether they collect a single quarter or all fifty—then the 125 million number makes sense. I don’t know if it gives you any truly useful information (it’s like saying everyone who has some postage in their desk drawer is a stamp collector), but yes, it makes sense.
A narrower definition would involve people who subscribe to a hobby publication(s), are on the Mint’s mailing list, belong to a numismatic club, visit coin shops or otherwise actively seek “rare” (non-circulating) coins, buy coin books or price-guides, chat in online coin forums, and/or go to coin shows on some regular basis (whether frequently or once a year).
We might call these “active” or “intermediate/advanced” coin collectors. They’re more involved in the hobby than the millions of casual collectors who set coins aside from circulation but don’t engage vigorously with the hobby community.
My two-penny estimate would be about 250,000 active coin collectors in the United States today.
Steve, what are your thoughts on measuring the population of coin collectors, and do you have a guesstimate of how many of us there are?
Image: If you go to a coin show to get your Red Book autographed, you might just be a coin collector. (Senior Editor Jeff Garrett signing the Guide Book of United States Coins at the May 2024 Central States Numismatic Society convention.)
Steve: Indeed, it’s all about the definition of coin collector. Some metrics that have been used include American Numismatic Association membership or Coin World subscribers, but are these people necessarily active buyers of coins? Does being a coin collector assume that person is still actively collecting, or perhaps just enjoying their coins? Virtually any time I’ve seen an estimate of the number of coin collectors in the United States, the definition of “coin collector” is vague. As you pointed out, is anyone who keeps an elongated coin from a vacation, or an old coin gifted by a relative a collector?
Your estimate of 250,000 active collectors might be a bit conservative, but again, it’s all based on the definition of a coin collector. Based on U.S. Proof set sales – which have been hovering at 350,000 to 450,000 over the past decade – I’d bump that number up to 500,000 folks who actively seek to learn about coins and occasionally add some to their collections.
As a side note, in researching what the U.S. Mint says about this, they have a section for kids where they introduce some of the specific words used by coin collectors. They write, “a person who collects coins is called a numismatist (‘noo-miz-ma-tist’). Numismatics (‘noo-miz-ma-ticks’) is the study and collecting of things that are used as money, including coins, tokens, and paper bills,” before recommending joining the ANA!
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Hello! And welcome to the ANA’s blog series, “Collecting Friends.”
We decided to approach this much like a conversation between friends. One of us starts with a topic, then the other responds. Simple as that. Along those lines, we’ll keep the tone conversational as much as possible.
We both write about coins professionally, and will keep our relative style guides in our writing. For Dennis, Publisher at Whitman Publishing, that means capitalizing “Proof” and italicizing Red Book and never saying anything bad about Ken Bressett, who’s awesome anyway.
For Steve, who’s written with Coin World for 15 years, it means Winged Liberty Head dime instead of “Mercury” dime, and similar nuances and oddities. And, it means writing A Guide Book of United States Coins (better known as the “Red Book”).
Both of us started collecting when we were little, introduced to coins by a chance encounter with an old coin that sparked our curiosity. One of Steve’s interests is coin valuation, and he gravitates towards the intersection of art and coins. Dennis enjoys medals and world coins, and studying modern U.S. coins in the context of older series, what came before.
We met in 2012 at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the Austrian Mint where there was both a Ben Franklin and a Betsy Ross impersonator. We’ve become great friends in the past decade. We even were appointed together to sit on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee starting in 2016, but Steve resigned soon after he was appointed to accept a full-time job at the Treasury Department while Dennis was re-appointed in 2020.
We taught a course together on numismatic publishing and writing a few years ago at the Summer Seminar, and while life has gotten in the way of us teaching another class, we jumped at our friend Caleb’s suggestion that we write a column. We hope you enjoy it!
The American Numismatic Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and encouraging people to study and collect coins and related items. The Association serves collectors, the general public, and academic communities with an interest in numismatics.
The ANA helps all people discover and explore the world of money through its vast array of educational programs including its museum, library, publications, conventions and numismatic seminars.