Sponsors (4)
The bill aims to cut minting and cash-transaction costs and provide orderly controls around discontinuing coins, but it shifts small costs and administrative burdens onto cash users, small businesses, and federal agencies and creates legal/operational frictions during the transition.
Taxpayers, businesses, and cash users: Ending general-circulation penny production and permitting a cheaper 5-cent coin composition reduces long-term minting costs and, combined with required phase-out planning and Fed evaluation, can limit disruption from changing coinage.
Cash customers and merchants: Authorized rounding of cash transactions to the nearest 5 cents speeds checkout, reduces need for exact change, and lowers handling/storage costs for businesses, with statutory protection from conflicting federal rules making adoption less legally risky.
Consumers using non-cash payments: The bill preserves payment protections for checks, cards, electronic transfers and other non-cash instruments so rounding rules apply only to cash and do not affect electronic payments.
Low-income and frequent cash users: Rounding cash transactions to the nearest 5 cents can systematically cost consumers a few cents per transaction if businesses round in their favor, disproportionately harming people who rely on cash.
Small businesses, vending operators, and taxpayers: Changing coin metals/compositions and stopping penny production will impose short-term costs — recalibrating machines, updating point-of-sale systems, and additional testing/procurement and implementation expenses for the Mint and Treasury.
Workers and employers: Uneven employer adoption of cash-rounding and ambiguity about when rounding favors customers versus sellers can create fairness concerns, disputes at checkout, and compliance/training burdens for small employers.
Based on analysis of 7 sections of legislative text.
Stops penny production for circulation, permits a new two-layer nickel-based 5-cent coin, allows voluntary cash rounding to nearest 5 cents, and requires Treasury/Fed planning and congressional notice.
Official title: Direct the Secretary of the Treasury to stop minting the penny, to require cash transactions to be rounded up or down to the nearest 5 cents, and for other purposes.
Introduced April 30, 2025 by Cynthia M. Lummis · Last progress August 10, 2026
Ends general circulation of the one-cent coin, authorizes a redesigned 5-cent coin that can include a zinc inner layer with a nickel outer layer, and permits voluntary rounding of cash transactions to the nearest five cents under defined rules. It also requires Treasury notice to Congress before discontinuing any circulating coin and directs the Federal Reserve to produce a strategic plan and ongoing evaluations about penny acceptance at commercial coin terminals and the impacts of ending penny production.