Which American Women Quarter Is the Rarest?
Among the coins struck for circulation, the 2025 Dr. Vera Rubin quarter. 55,800,000 were struck at Philadelphia and 63,000,000 at Denver, 118,800,000 in total: the lowest of all 20 designs and the only one in the series under 150 million. It is the key date of the American Women Quarters Program.
A key date is the coin in a series that is hardest to find, and therefore the one a complete set is most likely to be missing. It is not automatically the valuable one, and in this series it is not.
The five lowest mintages in the series
| # | Year | Honoree | Released | Philadelphia (P) | Denver (D) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18 | 2025 | Dr. Vera Rubin Lowest mintage | 2 Jun 2025 | 55,800,000 | 63,000,000 | 118,800,000 |
| 19 | 2025 | Stacey Park Milbern | 11 Aug 2025 | 94,800,000 | 59,400,000 | 154,200,000 |
| 20 | 2025 | Althea Gibson | 20 Oct 2025 | 117,200,000 | 80,000,000 | 197,200,000 |
| 13 | 2024 | Dr. Mary Edwards Walker | 3 Jun 2024 | 141,200,000 | 159,400,000 | 300,600,000 |
| 14 | 2024 | Celia Cruz | 5 Aug 2024 | 149,600,000 | 156,200,000 | 305,800,000 |
Four of the five lowest-mintage designs are from 2025. That is not a coincidence or a deliberate scarcity: the Mint simply struck far fewer quarters in the program's final year. Total 2025 production was 1,110,200,000, against 2,665,600,000 in 2023.
The three highest, for comparison
| # | Year | Honoree | Released | Philadelphia (P) | Denver (D) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | 2023 | Edith Kanakaʻole Highest mintage | 27 Mar 2023 | 372,800,000 | 368,600,000 | 741,400,000 |
| 6 | 2023 | Bessie Coleman | 3 Jan 2023 | 302,000,000 | 317,200,000 | 619,200,000 |
| 3 | 2022 | Wilma Mankiller | 6 Jun 2022 | 310,000,000 | 297,400,000 | 607,400,000 |
The Edith Kanakaʻole quarter at 741,400,000 is 6.2 times the Rubin mintage.
Why the key date is still worth 25 cents
118.8 million is an enormous number of coins. For comparison, the 1909-S VDB Lincoln cent, a genuine key date that trades in the hundreds of dollars, had a mintage of 484,000. The Rubin quarter's mintage is roughly 245 times larger.
Rarity only creates value when demand outruns supply. There are not 118 million people trying to complete an American Women Quarters set. A circulated Rubin quarter is worth 25 cents, and an uncirculated one a dollar or two, the same as every other coin in the series.
Where the key date does matter: if you are assembling a complete 20-coin set from circulation, this is the one you will be hunting last. Fewer were made, and they were made at the end of the program when general interest had already fallen off.
How this compares with a real key date
It is worth seeing the gap in scale. The 1909-S VDB Lincoln cent is the textbook American key date and trades in the hundreds of dollars in low grades. Its mintage was 484,000. The Rubin quarter's mintage is roughly 245 times larger. The 1916-D Mercury dime, another classic key, had a mintage of 264,000.
Those coins are also more than a century old, which matters as much as the mintage. Survival rates do the work that mintage figures only hint at: most 1909 cents were spent, worn out and lost. Every American Women Quarter ever struck is, on the scale that counts, still here. Nothing in this series has had time to become scarce, and a coin struck in 2025 will not be scarce in your lifetime.
Finding one in circulation
If you want a Rubin quarter the honest route is to buy an uncirculated one for a dollar or two rather than search for it, but it can be found. Two things work in your favor and one against.
- In your favor: 118.8 million coins is still a lot of coins, and they entered circulation recently, in June 2025, so they have not had time to be pulled out by collectors.
- In your favor: almost nobody is looking. Collector attention moved on when the program ended.
- Against you: at 118.8 million out of 8.02 billion American Women Quarters, the Rubin design is about one in every 68 coins from the series you handle, and American Women Quarters are themselves a minority of the quarters in circulation alongside the 1999 to 2021 designs.
Bank rolls are the usual method. A $10 roll holds 40 quarters. Searching by design rather than by date is easier here than in most series, because the reverse tells you immediately which coin you have.
If you have seen Althea Gibson listed as the rarest
Some widely copied tables give the 2025 Althea Gibson quarter at around 67 million and call it the lowest mintage in the series. That was a partial count, taken before production of the last coin in the program had finished. The Mint's final figures are 117,200,000 at Philadelphia and 80,000,000 at Denver, 197,200,000 in total. Gibson is fifth-lowest, not first.
What about San Francisco coins?
Everything above is about the coins struck for circulation at Philadelphia and Denver. San Francisco also struck every design, in uncirculated finish for rolls, bags and three-roll sets sold to collectors, and as clad and silver proofs. None of those were released into circulation.
Those S coins are far scarcer than any P or D coin. Figures circulating online put the uncirculated S issues at roughly 300,000 to 560,000 per design, a few hundred times fewer than the circulation strikes. But the U.S. Mint has not published per-design S mintages for this program, and wherever we have found those figures they carry no citation to a Mint source. Until there is a sourced number, this site does not print one.
Scarcity does not translate into much value here either. The S coins went straight from the Mint to collectors, so essentially every one survives in uncirculated condition, and there is no rare survivor population of the kind that makes an old key date expensive. You will not find one in change.
What about the 2025 Stacey Park Milbern quarter?
Second-lowest in the series at 154,200,000, and worth noting for the same reason. Its Denver mintage of 59,400,000 is actually the lowest single-mint figure of any coin in the program, lower than either Rubin figure. If you are tracking mint marks separately rather than designs, the 2025-D Milbern is the scarcest single issue of the 20.
Last verified: October 2026. Mintage figures are final.