The House voted without a single dissent to kill the penny for good, a rare bipartisan move that would save taxpayers $56 million a year and reshape how Americans handle cash.
Every member of the House who cast a vote Monday backed the Common Cents Act, a bill that would prohibit the Treasury from ever minting another one-cent coin and lock in a nationwide rounding system for cash transactions. The legislation, led by Rep. Lisa McClain, a Michigan Republican, and Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, codifies a change the U.S. Mint already made on its own last November when it stopped pressing pennies after 232 years in circulation.
The bill now heads to the Senate. If it clears that chamber and reaches the president's desk, no future administration could restart penny production without an act of Congress.
The math behind the vote is blunt. By 2025, every single penny rolling off the Mint's presses cost roughly three cents to produce. That means taxpayers were subsidizing a coin most Americans drop into jars, leave on counters, or throw away. The Treasury estimates immediate annual savings of $56 million once the bill becomes law, money that currently goes to zinc, copper plating, and the overhead of stamping out a coin almost nobody wants to carry.
The Mint pulled the plug on production in November 2025, but that was an administrative decision, reversible by any future Treasury secretary or president with different priorities. The Common Cents Act turns that executive choice into a statute.
Eliminating the penny creates an obvious question: what happens when a cash register rings up $4.37? The bill answers it with a straightforward rounding framework. All cash transactions would be rounded to the nearest five cents. Under the system, totals ending in one, two, six, or seven cents round down in the consumer's favor, while totals ending in three, four, eight, or nine cents round up.
The rounding applies only to cash purchases. Credit and debit card transactions, which already settle to the exact cent electronically, would not change.
Lawmakers added a wage protection as well. If a worker's cash pay comes out to a total not evenly divisible by five cents, the employer must round up, not down. That provision, reported by the New York Post, ensures the rounding system cannot shave fractions off paychecks over time.
The bill also directs a study of how penny elimination might affect vulnerable populations, an acknowledgment that lower-income Americans still rely more heavily on cash than wealthier households do.
Washington can barely agree on naming a post office most weeks. A unanimous House vote on anything of substance is remarkable, and it says something that the one issue capable of uniting every faction, from progressive Democrats to MAGA Republicans, is the absurdity of spending three cents to make one.
The bipartisan sponsorship reflects that consensus. McClain, a conservative from Michigan's Thumb region, and Garcia, a progressive from Long Beach, occupy opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. They found common ground on a simple proposition: stop lighting taxpayer money on fire.
Still, the bill's path forward is not guaranteed. The Senate has not scheduled a vote, and no timeline for floor action there has been announced. Plenty of common-sense measures have died quietly in the upper chamber after sailing through the House.
One question the available reporting does not fully answer is what happens to the billions of pennies already scattered across America's couches, piggy banks, and car cup holders. The bill stops new production and sets up a rounding system, but whether existing pennies will be formally withdrawn from circulation or simply allowed to fade out over time remains unclear.
Canada faced a similar transition in 2013 when it eliminated its one-cent coin. Pennies remained legal tender but gradually vanished from daily commerce as retailers adopted rounding. The U.S. approach appears headed in the same practical direction, even if the legislative text has not been published in full.
The $56 million in projected savings is real but modest against the backdrop of a federal budget measured in trillions. The larger principle matters more: when a government program, even one as small as a coin, costs three times what it delivers, ending it should not require a decade of debate.
Congress proved Monday it can still do the obvious thing when the waste is too plain to spin. The question is whether the Senate will follow, or whether even a penny's worth of common sense is too much to ask from Washington.
