The Astonishing Surge: How a Mundane 5c Coin in Australia Transformed into a $3000 Valuable

An extremely rare two-headed 5c coin has been valued between $3,000 and $5,000 among collectors desperate to acquire one of their own.

The 2007 5c coin entered circulation with a major printing error before anyone realized that both sides feature the Queen’s head.

Enthusiasts have told all Australians to be on the lookout for the elusive piece after TikToker Barnes Meister found one in mint condition in his wallet.

Joel Kandiah, another coin enthusiast from Perth, said the error occurred when two head dies were pressed into one blank coin during production.

“When the mint sets up its press to make coins, the top of the die is the head side and the bottom is the tail side. But what happened here is that the bottom die was also the back, so it spit out a double-headed 5c coin,” Mr Kandiah said. told news.com.au.

Mistakes made by the Royal Australian Mint are very rare, but when they do happen, collectors scour the country to find them.

“The coin has very high quality assurance and quality control processes in place so it is virtually impossible to find an error, you are looking at less than 0.1 percent if not less than that,” Mr Kandiah said.

The last time anyone found a double-headed 5c coin was in 2022, and rare items only appear on second-hand markets once or twice a year.

At the moment there is only one of the coins listed on eBay which is in mint condition with a starting bid of $2,000.

The mint has never confirmed how many of these erroneous coins entered circulation, so the chances of finding one could be higher than expected.

‘The machines print 600 coins per minute and (the mint) tries to check all the coins, find the errors and take them out – so they may have taken out some errors, but chances are there is still a large is. Some of it is out there,” Kandiah said.

Valuable coins with misprints usually have only the slightest flaw in their design, which is what makes them so difficult to spot.

Perth-based coin enthusiast Joel Kandiah said the error occurred when two ‘master dies’ were pressed into a single blank coin during production at the Royal Australian Mint.

There is only one double-headed 5 cent coin on eBay at the time of writing with a starting bid of $2,000

A Victoria woman found a 20 cent coin with a ‘wavy baseline’ on the number two and discovered she could sell it for $4,000 thanks to the error.

Usually the baseline is a solid line without any curvature.

The mint made another mistake when it released a batch of “Mule Dollar” coins – a small number of $1 coins from the year 2000 that were made with the wrong overprint.

The Mule dollar, which can sell for $3,000, has a double border around the edge instead of the regular $1 coin, which has one.

Coin expert Matthew Thompson of Town Hall Coins and Collectables in Sydney said valuable coins are still in circulation because people don’t look at them.

“People don’t expect institutions like the Mint to make mistakes,” he recently told Daily Mail Australia.

‘But things can go wrong every now and then. If you see errors on a coin, if you have something interesting or strange or out of place, then other people will probably find it interesting too – that’s why people collect.”

Others like to inspect every coin in their change jars, a process called noodling.

‘I’ve done it before when I have a bag of coins or change jars. If you just spend some time on it, it can definitely be worth it,” he said.