"Junk silver" is the casual term US stackers use for old American coinage that was struck in real silver back when dimes, quarters, and half dollars contained the metal as part of their face value.
The coins still spend at face value as US legal tender, but their silver content has been worth several multiples of face value for decades. The "junk" label has nothing to do with the coins themselves — it's there to distinguish them from numismatic ("collectible") coins, where the value is in rarity and condition rather than melt.
Junk silver is its own corner of the Gold Silver Ledger catalog because the math for valuing it is different from a standard bullion coin.
This article covers what makes it different, which coins are seeded in the catalog, what the multipliers attached to each entry mean, and how to handle the same kind of coinage from other countries.
The "junk" in junk silver
"Junk" here is shorthand for "no numismatic premium." The coins were minted in the millions, circulated for decades, and most of them are visibly worn. To a collector, that wear is value-destroying — a worn 1923 Peace Dollar is worth less than a pristine one.
To a stacker, the wear is irrelevant: what they're buying is the silver content, and a worn coin contains roughly the same silver as a pristine one.
So when someone says they've "got a bag of junk silver," they mean fractional US coinage being valued for the silver, not the coin. It's not derogatory, and the coins themselves are perfectly handsome — they're just being treated as bullion rather than as collectibles.
Why 1965 is the cutoff
The line at 1965 isn't arbitrary. The Coinage Act of 1965 removed silver from circulating US dimes and quarters entirely and reduced the silver content of the half dollar from 90% to 40%, beginning with coins struck that year.
From 1971 onward, the half dollar went to a copper-nickel clad composition with no silver at all.
That gives the catalog two natural eras:
Pre-1965 (90% silver). Dimes, quarters, and half dollars struck in 1964 or earlier. All of them are 90% silver / 10% copper, an alloy familiar from a century of US silver coinage.
1965–1970 Kennedy Half Dollar (40% silver). The transitional period after the Coinage Act, where the dime and quarter had already gone clad but the half dollar held onto a reduced silver content for six more years.
The silver dollars (Morgan and Peace) predate the Coinage Act by a wider margin, but they're the same 90% alloy and they slot into the same valuation logic — they just carry a larger face value per coin.
What's in the catalog
The catalog ships with six US junk silver entries. The standard set most stackers in the United States deal with:
Pre-1965 Dime (90% silver): Circulating dimes struck in 1964 or earlier, including Mercury and Roosevelt designs.
Pre-1965 Quarter (90% silver): Circulating quarters struck in 1964 or earlier, including Standing Liberty and Washington designs.
Pre-1965 Half Dollar (90% silver): Circulating halves struck in 1964 or earlier, including Walking Liberty, Franklin, and 1964 Kennedy designs.
1965–1970 Kennedy Half (40% silver): The transitional half dollar from the Coinage Act era.
Morgan Silver Dollar: 1878–1904 and 1921. 90% silver, $1 face value.
Peace Silver Dollar: 1921–1935. Same 90% silver, $1 face value.
Each entry has a fixed weight, purity, face value, and multiplier baked into the catalog row, so when you record a transaction you only enter the count and the price — the silver content is computed for you.
What the multipliers mean
The multiplier is the bit of catalog data that turns face value into silver content. It represents how many troy ounces of pure silver are contained in one dollar of face value for that coin type. There are only two numbers in play across the six entries:
0.715: The multiplier for every 90% silver entry (the three pre-1965 denominations plus both dollar coins). $1 of face value in 90% silver coinage contains roughly 0.715 troy oz of silver.
0.295: The multiplier for the 1965–1970 Kennedy Half. Reduced silver content (40%) gives a smaller silver-per-dollar figure.
The reason the catalog uses a multiplier rather than calculating from each coin's individual weight is practical: junk silver is bought, sold, and bagged by face value, not by weight.
A $50 bag of pre-1965 quarters has a known silver content per dollar of face value, regardless of which specific quarters are in the bag. The multiplier makes that calculation trivial.
To make it concrete: at a spot silver price of $80/oz, $1 in pre-1965 dimes is worth $80 × 0.715 = $57.20 in melt. A $100 face value bag of mixed pre-1965 dimes, quarters, and halves is worth $100 × 0.715 × $80 = $5,720 in melt — independent of how the face value is split across denominations, because the multiplier is the same for all three.
For the longer treatment of the formula with worked examples, see How junk silver melt value is calculated.
Non-US fractional silver and custom products
The six catalog entries cover the US side of junk silver. If you stack fractional silver from other countries — Canadian dimes and quarters (which were 80% silver before 1967 and 50% afterward), British pre-1947 silver coinage (which went from 92.5% to 50% in 1920), Australian or New Zealand pre-decimal silver, or anything else — those don't appear in the standard catalog.
The right move is a custom product set to the Junk Silver calculation method. You enter the face value per coin (in its own currency), the multiplier (silver content per unit of face value), and the app handles the rest of the math the same way it does for US entries.
Where to go next
How junk silver melt value is calculated: The full melt formula with worked examples.
The built-in catalog: what's included: The broader catalog tour, with junk silver in context.
Custom junk-silver-style products: The setup for non-US fractional silver.
Creating a custom product: The general custom-product flow.
How to record a purchase: Using junk silver entries in a buy transaction.