Missouri's Penny-Rounding Law Kicks In Aug. 28. Here's What Changes
The U.S. Mint struck its last circulating penny in November. Now state legislatures are racing to write the rounding rules cash registers will actually use.
Missouri cash registers get a new rule on Aug. 28: if you pay with bills and coins, your total might not match the price tag anymore.
The state's new penny-rounding law lets merchants round cash transactions to the nearest nickel, joining at least 16 other states — Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia and Washington — that already allow it, according to a client alert from law firm Holland & Knight. Connecticut's version takes effect Jan. 1, 2027.
None of this would be necessary if the penny were still being made. It isn't. The U.S. Mint struck its last circulating one-cent coin at a ceremonial event in Philadelphia on Nov. 12, 2025, ending 232 years of production. For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!
President Donald Trump wrote in the February 2025 Truth Social post that started the process, adding that he'd told the Treasury Department to stop.
The math nobody could defend
Over the past decade, the cost of producing and distributing a single penny climbed from 1.3 cents to 3.69 cents, according to the Treasury Department's own accounting. That's nearly four times the coin's face value. In fiscal year 2024 alone, minting more than 3 billion new pennies cost the government $85.3 million more than the coins were worth — a loss economists call seigniorage, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond analysis. Halting production is projected to save the Mint $56 million a year in materials alone.
Roughly 114 billion pennies are still out there, in jars and car cupholders and register drawers, and the Treasury wants them spent, not hoarded. The more that stay in circulation, the longer stores can make exact change without forcing anyone into rounding.
How the rounding actually works
The rule most states have landed on is symmetrical: if a cash total ends in 1, 2, 6 or 7 cents, it rounds down to the nearest nickel; if it ends in 3, 4, 8 or 9 cents, it rounds up. A $19.82 tab becomes $19.80. A $19.83 tab becomes $19.85. Totals ending in 0 or 5 cents don't move at all. Card, check, gift-card and app payments are untouched — they still settle to the exact cent, and so does the sales tax calculation underneath the rounding, which is figured on the unrounded total first.
That distinction matters because rounding isn't automatically neutral. Economists Zhu Wang and Russell Wong at the Richmond Fed used three days of real transaction data from 4,671 consumers in the Federal Reserve's 2023 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice and found cash totals cluster more often on digits that round up than down. Scaled to the full adult population, they estimate the resulting "rounding tax" at about $6.06 million a year nationally — a modest number split across hundreds of millions of transactions, but a real one.
A rulebook that changes at the state line
Rounding creates a legal wrinkle that has nothing to do with math: cash-discrimination laws. Miami-Dade County, for instance, makes it illegal for a retailer to charge cash customers more than card customers — precisely what rounding up does, one purchase at a time. Oregon and Connecticut rewrote their cash-discrimination statutes to carve out an exception for penny rounding; other cities, including Philadelphia, San Francisco, Detroit and Washington, D.C., haven't, which is why Holland & Knight is telling restaurant and retail clients to check local rules before they start rounding, not just the state ones.
Congress has its own fix waiting in the wings — the Common Cents Act has passed the House but not the Senate — and New York's legislature has sent its own rounding bill to the governor's desk. Until one of those settles the question nationally, the penny's disappearance is being managed the way most American money questions eventually are: state by state, with the nearest nickel as the only thing everyone agrees on. It's the same kind of patchwork daybreakwire has tracked before with state gift-card rules that vary depending on where you shop, and pennies are following the same path from a federal decision to fifty different rollouts.
For now, the safest assumption at the register is simple: pay with a card if you want the exact price, and don't be surprised if the cashier reaches for a nickel instead of a penny that isn't there anymore.
