when did canada stop making pennies

Canada stopped making new pennies in 2012 , and they disappeared from everyday circulation in 2013.

Key dates

• The last Canadian penny was minted on May 4, 2012 at the Royal Canadian Mint in Winnipeg.

• The Mint stopped distributing pennies to financial institutions on February 4, 2013, which is effectively when pennies were phased out of daily cash use.

How it worked in practice

• After February 2013, cash transactions began rounding to the nearest 5 cents (for example, 1.02 rounded down to 1.00; 1.03 rounded up to 1.05).

• Pennies remain legal tender on paper, but stores are no longer expected to give them out in change, so they’ve largely vanished from wallets and tills.

Why Canada stopped making pennies

• Each penny cost about 1.6 cents to produce, meaning the government lost money on every coin it made.

• The coin’s purchasing power had eroded so much that it cluttered pockets and cash registers more than it helped with pricing, and billions of pennies were simply hoarded in jars instead of circulating.

What happened to all the old pennies?

• The government began a multi‑year process to recover and recycle billions of pennies, melting them down for their metal content.

• Many Canadians kept a few as souvenirs or collectibles, especially commemorative designs and older high‑copper issues.

TL;DR

Canada’s last penny was minted in May 2012 , and pennies were pulled from circulation in February 2013 , mainly because they cost more to make than they were worth and had very little practical use left.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.