The House voted without a single dissent to permanently eliminate the penny, a coin that costs more than three times its face value to produce, and now the bill heads toward President Trump's desk.
The Common Cents Act cleared the House on Monday in a unanimous vote, formalizing what the U.S. Mint already set in motion when it stopped striking pennies in November 2025 after 232 years of continuous production. The bill would permanently block the Treasury from minting new one-cent coins, with a narrow exception for collectors, and establish a nationwide framework for rounding cash transactions to the nearest nickel.
Rep. Lisa McClain, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House GOP Conference, led the legislation. Rep. Robert Garcia, the California Democrat who serves as the top-ranking minority member on the House Oversight Committee, co-led it. The bipartisan pairing produced a result almost unheard of in today's Congress: a roll call with zero opposition. The bill now needs President Trump's signature to become law.
The math behind the vote is hard to argue with. As of 2025, minting a single penny cost the federal government more than three times the coin's face value. The Treasury estimated an immediate annual savings of $56 million from halting production, money that had been spent, year after year, manufacturing a coin most Americans drop into jars and forget.
McClain had pushed this fight before. A prior bill she led passed both the House and the Senate, directing the federal government to stop minting the penny. But that earlier measure lacked a critical piece: it said nothing about what happens at the cash register once pennies disappear. The Common Cents Act fills that gap.
Under the bill's rounding framework, cash transactions would be rounded to the nearest five cents. Cash wages carry an extra protection: if a worker's pay isn't evenly divisible by five cents, the employer must round up. Existing pennies remain legal tender, they don't become worthless overnight, but the government will no longer spend taxpayer money producing new ones.
The legislation arrives after months of real-world disruption. President Trump announced in February that the U.S. would stop minting pennies, citing the high production costs. The Mint spent 3.7 cents to produce each penny in 2024, AP News reported. The last pennies rolled off the line in June and were distributed by August, with the Federal Reserve curtailing penny shipments to banks shortly after.
But the executive action came without a federal rounding rule, leaving merchants and banks to fend for themselves. Retailers like the Kwik Trip convenience-store chain lost millions of dollars by rounding down on cash transactions to avoid lawsuits, since some states prohibit rounding up. Banks ran short on pennies. Customers and cashiers were left guessing.
Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores captured the frustration of businesses caught in the gap between policy and practice:
"We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go."
Lenard added a pointed request for Washington:
"We don't want the penny back. We just want some sort of clarity from the federal government on what to do, as this issue is only going to get worse."
The Common Cents Act is Congress's answer. By writing the rounding rules into statute, the bill replaces the patchwork of state-by-state improvisation with a single federal standard.
The bill doesn't stop at pennies. It includes a provision allowing the U.S. Mint to produce nickels from cheaper materials than currently used. That matters because nickels are their own money pit. In fiscal year 2025, each nickel cost 13.31 cents to manufacture, more than double its five-cent face value, Just The News reported. The bill grants the Treasury authority to test and develop a cheaper recipe, potentially saving tens of millions more.
The legislation also directs the Treasury to study the rounding framework's impact on vulnerable populations, specifically low-income consumers, older Americans, and people without traditional bank accounts. Congress instructed the department to monitor for disruptions and report back, a concession to concerns that the poorest cash-reliant shoppers could lose a few cents on every transaction.
Unanimous votes on anything of substance are vanishingly rare in the current Congress. That both parties lined up behind the Common Cents Act reflects a straightforward reality: the penny had become indefensible on the merits. No member wanted to be on record voting to keep spending $56 million a year minting coins that cost more to produce than they're worth.
The bill's path forward still has a step to clear. The Senate would need to take up the measure and pass it before it reaches President Trump. The Trump administration had already ordered the Treasury to halt penny production, suggesting the White House is aligned with the bill's direction. Whether the Senate moves quickly or lets the legislation sit remains an open question.
For now, the penny joins a short list of American artifacts, the half-cent coin, the two-cent piece, that outlived their usefulness and were retired. The difference is that those earlier coins disappeared quietly. The penny's exit has been messy, costly for businesses, and months overdue for a legal framework.
When both parties can agree that a government program wastes money and needs to end, the only question worth asking is why it took this long.
