The House voted without a single objection to permanently kill the penny and round cash transactions to the nearest nickel, a rare bipartisan move to stop wasting $56 million a year on a coin that costs more than three times its face value to make.
The Common Cents Act cleared the chamber on Monday with unanimous support, a legislative rarity in a Congress that can barely agree on what day it is. The bill would bar the Treasury from minting new pennies, except collector coins, and create a federal framework for rounding cash transactions to the nearest five cents. Rep. Lisa McClain, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House GOP Conference, led the effort alongside Rep. Robert Garcia, the California Democrat who serves as the top-ranking minority member on the House Oversight Committee.
If President Trump signs the measure into law, it would lock in a policy his own administration already set in motion. The U.S. Mint stopped producing pennies in November 2025 after 232 continuous years of circulation, and the Treasury issued a press release estimating that halting production would save taxpayers $56 million annually. Each penny now costs more than three times its one-cent face value to manufacture.
This is not McClain's first attempt. She previously led a bill directing the federal government to stop minting the one-cent coin, and that measure passed both the House and the Senate. But it lacked any language addressing how businesses and consumers should handle cash transactions once the penny disappeared from registers.
The Common Cents Act fills that gap. Under the bill, cash transactions would be rounded to the nearest five cents, with one notable protection for workers. Cash wages that do not divide evenly by five cents must be rounded upward, not down. Existing pennies already in circulation would remain legal tender.
The legislation also tackles the nickel. It would allow the U.S. Mint to produce five-cent coins from cheaper materials than those currently used. That provision matters: nickels cost 13.31 cents apiece to produce in fiscal year 2025, Just The News reported, meaning the government loses money on every nickel it stamps out, too.
And the bill directs the Treasury to study how the shift to rounding affects low-income Americans, older consumers, and people without bank accounts, a concession to concerns that eliminating the smallest denomination could quietly pinch the people least able to absorb even minor cost increases.
The legislative push did not happen in a vacuum. Trump announced on February 9 that the U.S. would stop minting pennies. The last coins rolled off the line in June and were distributed by August 2025. But the executive decision came without congressional authorization or federal guidance on rounding, and the gap between action and law created real problems on the ground.
Banks and retailers ran short on pennies as the existing supply thinned. Kwik Trip, the Midwest convenience-store chain, began rounding down cash transactions on its own, a decision AP News reported cost the company roughly $3 million this year, driven partly by the fear of customer lawsuits in the absence of a clear federal rule.
Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores captured the frustration of an industry that had wanted the penny gone for decades but not like this:
"We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go."
Lenard added a pointed request aimed squarely at Washington:
"We don't want the penny back. We just want some sort of clarity from the federal government on what to do, as this issue is only going to get worse."
The Common Cents Act is Congress's answer. By codifying the rounding framework and making the production halt permanent through statute, the bill would prevent a future administration from reversing course and restarting the presses, and it would give businesses the legal certainty they have been operating without for months.
The House vote was not the only chamber to act. The Senate passed the Common Cents Act with unanimous consent as well, formally ending penny production as a matter of federal law once the president signs it. Under the Senate-passed version, the Federal Reserve would also be required to limit "disruptions in the penny supply" during the transition, as Just The News detailed.
The bipartisan, bicameral unanimity is striking in a Congress that has struggled to move even basic legislation without partisan trench warfare. The Senate's recent marathon sessions on spending and confirmations have shown how rare smooth legislative action has become, which makes the penny bill's frictionless path all the more notable.
Whether Trump will sign the measure remains an open question. His administration already ordered the Treasury to halt production, so the bill largely codifies what the executive branch has already done. But the added rounding rules, the nickel-material provision, and the study on vulnerable consumers go beyond the original executive action.
The savings are real but modest by federal standards. Fifty-six million dollars a year amounts to a rounding error in a government that spent more than $6 trillion last fiscal year. The penny bill will not close the deficit or fix the debt ceiling. It will not put a dent in the entitlement spending that drives long-term fiscal risk.
But it is a clean example of something Washington almost never does: identify a government activity that costs more than it produces, agree across party lines that it should stop, and actually pass a law to stop it. The Trump administration's broader push to cut waste and streamline government operations has produced larger headlines on other fronts, but few results have been this bipartisan or this clean.
The penny itself, bearing Abraham Lincoln's profile since 1909, will not vanish overnight. Billions of one-cent coins remain in circulation, in jars, in couch cushions, and in the "take a penny, leave a penny" trays that have quietly acknowledged the coin's irrelevance for years. They stay legal tender under the new law.
The rounding framework will matter most to cash-heavy businesses and the consumers who rely on them. The bill's requirement that cash wages round upward is a small but concrete protection, the kind of detail that separates a serious piece of legislation from a symbolic gesture. The Treasury study on effects on low-income and debanked Americans will determine whether the rounding system works as intended or whether it quietly shifts pennies' worth of cost onto the people who can least afford it.
Broader policy shifts affecting lower-income households have drawn sharper debate elsewhere, but the penny bill's consumer-protection provisions suggest both parties recognized the risk of leaving vulnerable populations without a safety valve.
The Senate's recent legislative sprints have shown that Congress can still move fast when the political incentives align. On the penny, they aligned perfectly: no lobby fought to keep a coin that loses money on every unit produced, no constituency rallied to defend a denomination most Americans drop into tip jars or throw away.
When the government spends 3.7 cents to manufacture something worth one cent, the only question is why it took 232 years to stop. Congress finally found a problem small enough to solve, and for once, solved it without a fight.
