The denomination the Mint kept forgetting. Between the first quarter and the last Capped Bust quarter, 18 of 43 years produced none at all — and the blank years are evidence rather than gaps in the research: each one is a year the Mint chose to strike something else.
Quarter Dollars — each to be of one fourth the value of the dollar or unit, and to contain ninety-two grains and thirteen sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or one hundred and four grains of standard silver.
Act of April 2, 1792 §9
32 issues across forty-three years, 18 of them silent. These five decide what an early-quarter set costs — every one with a sourced survivor count, and none with a coin portrait we are entitled to publish.
The rarest circulating coin in the series, from the one delivery figure where record and trade agree exactly: 17,800 in calendar 1823, all from a single obverse die overdated from 1822. PCGS estimates 33 survivors and none Uncirculated — roughly 0.19% of the delivery, the lowest rate in the series, and a rate this reference cannot explain: at the series average near 1% the date would have left about 180 coins. The received explanation, Browning's melting hypothesis, rests on a mintage figure that is wrong by a factor of 6.6. And a census of this coin was being kept by letter in December 1867 — twenty years before the famous 1804-dollar census — per a PCGS note that is single-source and flagged as such. Auction record $246,750, AU58, Stack's Bowers, May 2015.
The record delivers 4,000 quarters in 1827 and no circulating 1827 quarter is known — the only 1827-dated pieces are two proof strikings. The Original, eight known, is the coin whose finest example sold for $227 in March 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, when the Mickley 1804 dollar would bring $750 three years later; the same coin made $705,000 in the Pogue sale of 2015. Browning's own plate coin of this issue is plate-matched into the modern census, and the plate is reproduced on this site. Auction-record field $444,000 PR65 (January 2019); the census field carries the higher Pogue figure — the two PCGS fields disagree and are cited separately.
A one-year type with no statement of value anywhere on it, and the most-saved coin in early US silver: of roughly 6,100 pieces attributed to the date, PCGS estimates 650 survive and 90 of them in Mint State — about 10.6% overall, with 14% of survivors Uncirculated, rates nothing else in the series approaches. It was saved as a novelty from the day it appeared, and Browning supplies the mechanism: "Specimen coins or proofs, were apparently struck from this reverse with both obverses." A Gem sold for $1,740,000 in January 2022 — the series record. Set it against the 1823/2 and the whole market logic of this series is on one page: here, condition beats rarity.
The Mint delivered no quarter dollars at all in calendar 1824 — the Comptroller's settlement lists half dollars as the year's only silver. Yet 1824/2 quarters exist, struck from a third shelved 1822 obverse, and PCGS prints a mintage of 24,000 — which, with the 1825/4/2's 144,000, sums exactly to the real 1825 delivery of 168,000. A figure was created for a year with no delivery and printed in the column reserved for the record; who first printed it is unidentified. This reference shows a blank instead. Browning's own rarity note is the one worth having, because it is observational: "Date scarce when worn by circulation, but very rare if sharp." PCGS estimates 400 survivors; record $141,000, MS64, May 2015.
The Capped Bust arrives — and the 69,232 quarters delivered in 1815 were the ENTIRE silver coinage of the United States that year: 69,232 × $0.25 = $17,308, the report's own total, exactly. A further 20,003 were delivered in the first days of 1816, before the Mint burned on January 11; no quarter bears the date 1816, and the trade's 89,235 merges the two deliveries. One Browning variety. PCGS estimates 1,875 survivors; record $282,000, MS67+★, November 2013.
Survivor counts are ESTIMATED, attributed to PCGS CoinFacts as of 24 August 2026 — an estimate of how many of each issue still exist in any grade, not a count of coins anyone has seen. The mintage beside it is OBSERVED, read from the Mint's delivery registry, which counts deliveries rather than dates. Market strips read the eBay Browse API live and are affiliate-tracked; asking prices, not realised sales, and nothing in them reorders this grid. Coins marked “photography pending” await rights-cleared imagery, per house rule.
The United States Mint never recorded how many coins of a given DATE it struck. It recorded how many coins the Chief Coiner DELIVERED TO THE TREASURER within a calendar year — and it printed the warning itself. In April 1891 an American Journal of Numismatics writer signing himself W. S. A. listed the dates the printed figures literally require you to believe in, and three of the anomalies on his list are quarter dollars: phantom quarters of 1797 and 1816, and an erased 1824. The record confirms all three.
Quarter dollars delivered by the Chief Coiner to the Treasurer
Three sub-runs with real seams at 1815 and 1831 — both of which the sources themselves mark as chapter breaks, and neither of which any reference has ever treated as the end of the series. Nearly three quarters of the whole coinage sits in the last eight years.
What share of each date is still here. This is the one table on the site whose figures no published authority states: the survival estimates are PCGS CoinFacts and the delivery figures are the Mint's, but the rate is ours — OunceDesk arithmetic over the two. It is classed DERIVED for that reason and is not a number to quote as anybody else's.
Estimated survivors as a share of coins delivered — OunceDesk arithmetic
Computed by OunceDesk from PCGS survival estimates (observed 2026-08-24) against the Mint's delivery figures. These rates are an analytical result of this reference, not a figure from any published authority. Where the denominator is a merge it is marked.
Hard Money. Hard Numbers. · Not investment advice. Some links pay us a commission — disclosures. Affiliate economics never determine research conclusions or rankings. © 2026 OunceDesk. Every figure classed OBSERVED / DERIVED / ESTIMATED / SPECULATIVE.