Live Swap Events

As a collector, there’s no better feeling than finding a sought-after 50p in your change! But with over 76 different 50p coin designs in circulation, how can you tell which ones are worth looking out for?

Luckily for you, we’ve done the hard work and compiled a number of resources to help you determine how rare your 50p is and how much it might be worth.

Mintages

A sure fire way to know if you’ve found a keeper is to check the mintage figures for your 50p. Generally speaking, the lower the mintage, the rarer the coin and the harder it will be to find in circulation.

Here is the most up to date mintage chart for UK 50p coins in circulation, with the UK’s rarest circulation 50p – the 2023 Salmon 50p – right at the top. The Salmon 50p recently overtook the Kew Gardens 50p as the rarest 50p when it was announced in October 2024 that only 200,000 of them are in circulation – 10,000 less than the 2009 Kew Gardens 50p!

In third place is the 2018 Peter Rabbit 50p with a mintage of 1,400,000, a huge jump up from the tiny mintage figures of the Salmon and Kew Gardens 50ps!

Click here to read more about the 50p mintage figures >> 

eBay Tracker

Mintage figures are a great way to find out how many of a certain coin were released into circulation and therefore, how difficult it might be to find – but this doesn’t necessarily give you a value for your coin. One way in which you can determine what your coin might be worth, is to look at how much it’s sold for on secondary market sites such as eBay.

Again, we’ve made things easy for you by taking the last 9 sold prices achieved on eBay for the top 10 coins and banknotes and giving you the median selling price. By taking the median, rather than an average, we avoid one or two excessive prices skewing the figures.

Our latest eBay Tracker update revealed that the rarest circulating 50p – the 2023 Salmon 50p – could fetch you up to £83.60 on the secondary market. However, a 2009 Kew Gardens 50p will still set you back over £140, despite no longer being the rarest 50p.

You can also see that the undated 20p, known as the ‘holy grail of change collecting’, is selling for a median of £64 – not a bad return on a 20p coin!

Read our latest eBay Tracker Update >>

Don’t see your coin on the eBay Tracker? You can use our 6 Point Guide to valuing your coins to determine how much they could be worth.

Change Checker’s Scarcity Index

Mintage figures only tell part of the story when determining how scarce and sought-after the coins in your collection are. That’s why we created the Change Checker Scarcity Index to give you a complete picture of how your coin compares to other 50ps in circulation.

We combine a coin’s mintage figure with how many collectors have listed the coin as being in their collection on the Change Checker App, and the number of times the coin has been requested as a swap on our Swap Centre.

Our latest Scarcity Index for 50p coins was the first one to feature the 2023 Salmon 50p, so the Kew Gardens 50p remains at the top whilst the Salmon 50p establishes itself as the new rarest 50p.

So how rare is your 50p?

So, now you know about the above tools, you can start to determine how rare your 50p is and how much it might be worth.

We’d love to know if you’ve found any rare coins in your change recently, so let us know in the comments below!

If you’re interested in coin collecting, our Change Checker web app is completely free to use and allows users to:

– Find and identify the coins in their pocket
– Collect and track the coins they have
– Swap their spare coins with other Change Checkers

Sign up today at: www.changechecker.org/app