What do the terms maximum mintage, declared mintage and issue limit mean?

If you’ve ever pondered terms like ‘maximum mintage’, ‘declared mintage’ and ‘issue limit’, this article is here to help.

What is maximum mintage?

Mints keep historical records of how many coins they strike and issue. The total number for each coin is known as the mintage. Thanks to mintage records at The Perth Mint we know that we made precisely 690,992 gold sovereigns 125 years ago in 1899.

Mintage figures are valuable to collectors because they provide guidance about ‘rarity’.

Today, the vast majority of our modern collectables are issued with a specific mintage limit. For example, our 125th Anniversary 2024 1oz Silver Proof Coin has a maximum mintage of 10,000. This means The Perth Mint will issue no more than 10,000 of these coins.

Say we receive orders over the next few months for the maximum mintage, production will cease immediately, and we’ll announce the coin as ‘sold out’. Collectors can be 100% certain that we’ll never make any more.

What is declared mintage?

So, what happens if the maximum mintage is not taken up by collectors? Obviously, it does not make sense for any Mint to keep making a collectable coin if the mintage is unlikely to sell out.

If after a reasonable period we judge the market no longer has any interest in the coin, or for some other reason it is no longer viable, we close-off production and declare the mintage.

A declared mintage is the final number that will ever be made available for sale, even though the declared figure falls short of the original maximum mintage stated by the Mint.

In this way, some declared coins end up being rarer than their original mintage limits would indicate. To find examples of this, visit the Collector coin mintages page.

What is issue limit?

Even though the 125th Anniversary 2024 1oz Silver Proof Coin has a maximum mintage of 10,000, you may have spotted that it has an advertised issue limit of 7,500.

Issue limits refer to the format in which the coin is packaged. In this instance, up to 7,500 coins are being offered in individual coin cases. As a result, 2,500 coins remain available within the maximum mintage for sale in a distinctively different format.

In fact, 2,500 coins have been made available for inclusion in the spectacular 125th Anniversary 2024 1oz Silver Typeset Collection, which includes gilded, coloured and bullion variants of the coin.

If collectors buy all 2,500 typesets, we will announce the issue limit as sold out. If the market only requires 1,000, we will declare that number as the total ever issued.