A standard modern U.S. penny (one‑cent coin) is about 0.75 inches (19.05 mm) across and about 0.06 inches (1.52 mm) thick.

How Big Is a Penny?

Quick Scoop

If you’re holding a regular U.S. penny in your hand, here’s its real-world size:

  • Diameter: about 0.75 inches (three‑quarters of an inch) ≈ 19.05 mm.
  • Thickness: about 0.06 inches (just under one‑sixteenth of an inch) ≈ 1.52 mm.
  • Shape: flat, round coin.
  • Feel: thin enough to stack easily, thick enough that a small stack starts to feel hefty.

A simple mental picture: if you lined them up edge to edge, it would take about 16 pennies to stretch along a 12‑inch school ruler.

Mini Sections

1. In Everyday Terms

Think of the penny like this:

  • Roughly the size of a typical shirt button.
  • A bit smaller than a bottle cap opening (which is why pennies sometimes “fit” into small hardware pieces).
  • About half the diameter of a U.S. quarter (0.955 inches), so two pennies side‑by‑side are a bit wider than one quarter.

If you put a penny on your fingertip, it just about covers the whorl of an adult thumbprint—big enough to feel solid, small enough to lose in your pocket.

2. Exact Measurements (Nerd Corner)

For the current U.S. cent design:

  • Diameter: 0.75 inches = 19.05 mm.
  • Thickness: 0.0598 inches ≈ 1.52 mm.
  • Weight: about 2.5 grams for modern copper‑plated zinc pennies (post‑1982 issues).

These dimensions have been stable for modern “small cents,” which replaced the much larger early U.S. cents from the 1800s.

3. Historical and Other “Penny” Sizes

“Penny” doesn’t always mean the U.S. coin; it can refer to:

  • Older large U.S. cents, which used to be noticeably bigger before the 1850s.
  • U.K. pennies and other countries’ pennies, with slightly different diameters and thicknesses.
  • “Penny” as a nail size (like 4d, 6d) in carpentry, which is a length measure, not a coin at all.

So when someone asks “how big is a penny,” most people today mean the modern U.S. one‑cent coin , but context can shift the answer.

4. Fun Size Comparisons

Here are a few playful ways to imagine the size:

  • Stack around 17 pennies and you get roughly an inch of height (since each is about 0.06 inches thick).
  • A credit card is about 0.03 inches thick, so a penny is a bit more than twice as thick as a credit card.
  • If you filled a small cylindrical container with pennies, each penny’s volume would be roughly 0.027 cubic inches.

5. Tiny Trend: “Mini Pennies”

There’s also a fun trending niche in coin and magic communities:

  • Novelty “mini pennies” used for magic tricks and gags, smaller than real coins and not legal money.
  • Error coins from the mint that come out undersized or oddly shaped; these can be of interest to collectors.

They’re not what you get in change at the store, but they keep the idea of “how tiny can a penny be?” alive in online discussions and forums.

TL;DR

  • A regular U.S. penny is about 0.75 inches (19.05 mm) across and 0.06 inches (1.52 mm) thick.
  • It’s about the size of a shirt button and roughly half the diameter of a quarter.

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