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What Can a Penny Buy in 2026? A Short, True Inventory
Not much. But not nothing.
On its own, one cent buys very little in 2026. At the U.S. average residential electricity price for July 2026, 18.31 cents per kilowatt-hour, a penny buys about 55 watt-hours of power. That is roughly three minutes of a 1,000-watt microwave, or about five and a half hours of a 10-watt LED bulb. What a penny mostly can’t buy is a card payment, because most card systems won’t process a charge that small.
Quick answer: A penny buys a few minutes of household electricity, one bid’s worth of price increase in a penny auction, and nothing at a card terminal. In cash, at a store with no pennies, a one-cent total can round down to zero. And the coin itself cost the Mint 3.69 cents to make in fiscal 2024.
Penny candy, then and now
Penny candy was exactly what it sounds like: small sweets sold one at a time, for a cent, out of jars on a store counter. It is probably the most famous thing a single coin ever reliably bought, and it is mostly a memory now.
The coin had its own problem. By fiscal 2024, the U.S. Mint was spending 3.69 cents to make and distribute each penny. When the money costs more than the candy used to, something has to give, and in November 2025 it was the penny. That story is in how much it costs to make a penny.
Electricity is an everyday thing still priced in units small enough for a penny to matter. Your utility bills you in cents per kilowatt-hour, so one cent is a real, if brief, unit of light. Use it wisely. Three minutes of microwave is enough for most leftovers and not enough for regret.
Penny auctions: cheap prices, expensive bids
Penny auctions sound like a place where a penny finally gets respect. They aren’t.
Consumer Reports explained the setup in 2011: bidding starts near zero, each bid raises the price by a fixed amount, “usually just a penny or two,” and each bid adds time to the clock. The catch is that every bid costs money, typically 50 cents to $1 each, and you pay for your bids whether you win or lose.
The Federal Trade Commission put it plainly the same year. Its example: win a camera with a $50 final price, but if you placed 200 bids at $1 each, your real cost is $250, plus shipping and possibly a transaction fee.
So in a penny auction, a penny is the price increase. The penny is the cheap part. Everything else is the expensive part.
A penny for your thoughts, rounded
The old phrase offers a penny for someone’s thoughts. In 2026, that offer has gotten complicated.
With no new pennies, Treasury guidance lets stores without penny change round cash totals to the nearest five cents. Under the common method described by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, totals ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7 cents round down, and totals ending in 3, 4, 8 or 9 round up. A cash total of one cent ends in 1. It rounds down to zero.
So at a register with no pennies, a penny for your thoughts is technically free. Your thoughts have been devalued by federal guidance. Please don’t take it personally.
Sales tax doesn’t get the same shortcut. Treasury says rounding applies only to the final cash total, after taxes and fees, and that sales tax is generally still calculated on the exact amount, with each state setting its own rules. Card and other non-cash payments stay exact to the cent. The penny still exists on every receipt. It just isn’t in the drawer.
Richmond Fed economists estimated that all this rounding to the nickel nets out to about $6.06 million a year in extra cost to consumers nationwide. Spread across the 258.3 million U.S. adults in their model, that works out to a little over two cents per adult per year, payable in coins you can no longer get as change.
Why sending one cent online is so hard
This is the part that built the site.
Card payments have minimums and fixed fees. One widely used card processor will not create a U.S. dollar charge below 50 cents, so its fee doesn’t exceed the charge, and its standard U.S. card price is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per successful transaction. A one-cent card charge is not small. It is impossible.
Merchants can also set their own floor. Federal law lets a business require a minimum credit card purchase of up to $10, as long as it treats every card network and issuer the same. That rule covers credit cards, not debit.
Meanwhile, cash, the one place a single penny used to travel freely, is now a small slice of daily life. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 payments diary found cash was used for 14 percent of consumer payments in 2024, and people were most likely to use cash for purchases under $25.
That leaves a strange gap. A penny is still legal tender, still worth one cent, and still very hard to hand to someone over the internet. That is why Chris built a site that asks everyone on Earth to voluntarily send him exactly one, and why the literal-penny option uses a person-to-person payment that can carry the whole cent. The details are in the FAQ, and the fee arithmetic is on the math page.
Eight billion pennies would be $80 million, a hypothetical gross total, not a forecast. One penny is one penny. Both are perfectly good numbers.
Find out what one cent can do. Send it here.
Not affiliated with the U.S. Mint, the U.S. Treasury or the Federal Reserve.
Sources: EIA average retail electricity prices, Mint FY2024 penny cost, Consumer Reports on penny auctions, FTC on penny auctions, Treasury penny FAQs, Richmond Fed on rounding, card processor minimum charge, card processor pricing, 15 U.S.C. 1693o-2 (credit card minimums), Federal Reserve 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice.
Meet the penny jar ↗By Chris. All articles