UK Coin Scarcity Index, 2026
Every circulating UK 50p, £1 and £2 ranked by a combined Scarcity Score, mintage weighted at 70% and how often the coin shows up in MyCoinage user collections weighted at 30%. The index uses live data from 228 circulating coins and updates as collectors add to their inventories.
50p, Top 10 scarcest
| Rank | Coin | Mintage | Owners | Scarcity Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 106,324 | 0 | ||
| #2 | 102,442 | 1 | ||
| #3 | 110,185 | 1 | ||
| #4 | 109,000 | 2 | ||
| #5 | 212,209 | 0 | ||
| #6 | 200,000 | 9 | ||
| #7 | 682,100 | 3 | ||
| #8 | 1,163,500 | 4 | ||
| #9 | 1,129,500 | 5 | ||
| #10 | 1,125,500 | 7 |
£2, Top 10 scarcest
| Rank | Coin | Mintage | Owners | Scarcity Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 131,788 | 0 | ||
| #2 | 345,891 | 1 | ||
| #3 | 485,500 | 1 | ||
| #4 | 588,500 | 3 | ||
| #5 | 771,750 | 2 | ||
| #6 | 650,000 | 6 | ||
| #7 | 650,500 | 8 | ||
| #8 | 1,040,000 | 4 | ||
| #9 | 975,000 | 6 | ||
| #10 | 1,443,116 | 3 |
£1, Top 10 scarcest
| Rank | Coin | Mintage | Owners | Scarcity Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 136,696 | 2 | ||
| #2 | 277,669 | 1 | ||
| #3 | 935,000 | 4 | ||
| #4 | 1,615,000 | 4 | ||
| #5 | 2,635,000 | 5 | ||
| #6 | 5,270,000 | 3 | ||
| #7 | 5,780,000 | 3 | ||
| #8 | 10,409,501 | 1 | ||
| #9 | 5,185,000 | 5 | ||
| #10 | 5,270,000 | 5 |
How the Scarcity Score is calculated
Two inputs feed every coin's Scarcity Score: the Royal Mint mintage and the number of MyCoinage users who own that coin. We combine them at 70% mintage / 30% demand because mintage is the hard floor (fewer coins struck = fewer to find ever) while demand is a refinement that catches commemoratives that were hoarded the moment they hit circulation.
The mintage component is log-scaled across the full denomination range. UK mintages span from roughly 200,000 (the 2023 Atlantic Salmon 50p) to over 50 million (a typical Royal Shield 50p), so a linear scale would compress most of the data into the bottom half of the score. Log-scaling gives every order of magnitude the same room.
The demand component normalises against the most-owned coin in the denomination, a coin that zero MyCoinage users have scores 100, the most-collected coin scores 0. This is a real signal of how easy a coin is to actually find: change-finder coins surface in collections fast, hoarded commemoratives don't.
The composite score is rounded to one decimal place. Coins added or removed from collections cause the index to recompute on the next page load, so the ranking moves continuously. This is also how we differ from Change Checker's scarcity index, their data is collector-app driven and updates monthly; ours is live and weighted toward the harder mintage floor.
Source data: MyCoinage methodology · Royal Mint mintage figures · rolling MyCoinage user-collection data.