The House passed the Common Cents Act without a single dissenting vote, permanently ending penny production and setting up a national rounding framework for cash transactions, a rare bipartisan move that now heads to President Trump's desk.
The legislation, led by House GOP Conference Chair Lisa McClain of Michigan and Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, would block the Treasury Department from minting new pennies except for collector coins. It passed the House on Monday with unanimous support, Fox News Digital reported, a striking show of agreement in a chamber that rarely agrees on anything.
The bill does more than formalize the end of penny production. It builds a legal framework for rounding cash transactions to the nearest five cents, directs the Treasury to study the impact on low-income, older, and unbanked consumers, and allows the U.S. Mint to start producing nickels from cheaper materials. If President Trump signs it into law, no future administration could reverse course and bring the penny back.
The math behind the bill is hard to argue with. As of 2025, minting a single penny costs the federal government more than three times the coin's face value. The Treasury estimated that halting production would save taxpayers $56 million a year, money that was, in the most literal sense, being thrown away.
The U.S. Mint stopped producing pennies in November 2025, ending 232 years of continuous circulation. But the legislative framework lagged behind the executive action, leaving businesses and banks to improvise.
That gap between action and law created real problems on the ground. AP News reported that merchants and banks across the country faced penny shortages with no federal guidance on how to handle cash transactions. The last pennies were minted in June and distributed to banks by August 2024, with the Treasury placing its final order of coin blanks in May. Roughly one-third of the 170 Federal Reserve coin terminals shut down penny deposits and withdrawals entirely, trapping surplus coins in some regions while others ran dry.
Convenience store chain Kwik Trip projected losses of approximately $3 million this year from rounding down cash transactions to avoid lawsuits, since rounding up is illegal in some states. Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores put it bluntly:
"We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go."
Lenard added that the industry does not want the penny back, it wants clarity from the federal government, warning that "this issue is only going to get worse." The Common Cents Act is Congress's answer to that plea.
Rep. McClain had already shepherded a prior bill through both the House and Senate directing the federal government to stop minting the penny. That earlier legislation passed both chambers but lacked the rounding language retailers and banks desperately needed. Without a legal framework telling businesses how to handle cash transactions in a penny-free economy, the earlier bill left a gaping operational hole.
The Common Cents Act fills it. Cash transactions round to the nearest five cents. Cash wages get a worker-friendly exception: if a total is not divisible by five cents, it rounds upward. Existing pennies remain legal tender, nobody's pocket change becomes worthless overnight.
The bill also tackles the broader cost problem in coin production. Nickels are expensive to mint too, Just The News reported that each nickel cost 13.31 cents to produce in fiscal year 2025, well above its five-cent face value. The Common Cents Act authorizes the Treasury to develop and test a cheaper recipe for nickel production, a provision aimed at stopping the government from simply shifting its money-losing coin habit from one denomination to another.
The Senate passed the Common Cents Act with unanimous consent, formally codifying the end of penny production and moving the bill to President Trump for his signature. The upper chamber's passage mirrored the House's unanimous vote, making the legislation one of the rare measures in recent memory to draw zero opposition in either chamber.
Congress also directed the Treasury to examine how the rounding framework affects vulnerable populations, specifically low-income consumers, older Americans, and people without bank accounts who rely more heavily on cash. That study requirement reflects a practical concern: cash-dependent households feel the effects of rounding more acutely than people who pay with cards.
The bill now sits with President Trump. His administration already ordered the Treasury to halt penny production, so signing the legislation would codify what his executive branch set in motion and lock it into statute.
Washington rarely agrees to stop doing something that costs taxpayers money. Programs survive long past their usefulness because someone benefits from the spending, even when the public does not. The penny is a small-dollar example of a much larger pattern, and the fact that it took 232 years and an act of Congress to stop minting a coin that costs three times its value to produce says plenty about the speed of federal reform.
Still, the bipartisan, unanimous nature of this vote is worth noting. McClain, a Republican, and Garcia, a Democrat, co-led the effort. No member of the House voted against it. The Senate cleared it without objection. The policy rationale, stop wasting $56 million a year on a coin nobody uses, was simple enough to cut through partisan noise.
The New York Post noted that the bill's signing would prevent any future administration from reversing the penny's elimination, a safeguard that ensures the savings are permanent rather than subject to the next president's whims.
If Congress could find this kind of agreement on every program that bleeds money for no good reason, the federal budget would look very different. The penny was the easy one. The hard ones are still waiting.
