Maker: U.S. Mint 
Original Price: $0.01*
Worth Today: $60,000 – $200,000+*

Though steel pennies from 1943 are worth only a few dollars, copper pennies from that year are worth between $60,000 and $200,000, if not more. 1943 copper pennies are extremely rare. According to the U.S. mint, only forty of these coins, made of a copper alloy, exist.

Pennies in the 1940s were only made of zinc-coated steel, not copper. Copper was needed for WWII, so these copper-alloy pennies were a mistake. Someone put the wrong blanks into the press hopper, and that led to the forty errors. You can determine if a penny from that year is copper, not steel, if the penny doesn’t stick to a magnet.