Rare 20p Coins And How To Identify Them

A Closer Look At How To Identify Rare 20p Coins

Rare 20p Coins could if you are lucky make you a tidy sum of money. A little-known fact about me is that I like to collect things.

My Collections

I love having a collection of items I can admire, and hopefully, items that will increase in value the longer I keep them.

If you have read my post on rare 50p coins, you will know I have been collecting Funko Pops and Retired Lego.

Some of these Funko Pops can fetch 10k or more. Considering their normal value of around £10 you can see how it gets addictive.

Another collection I have started with recently is coin collecting. It all started when I received a special Benjamin Bunny 50p coin from a friend who thought of me.

Special Coins

If you are unaware of what this is then let me tell you. This special edition 50p coin was issued in 2017 to celebrate one of Beatrix Potter’s much-loved characters. This is one of the four Beatrix Potter 50p coins released in 2017.

Once I checked it out on eBay I was excited as there were some going for a lot of money. However, when I looked further I saw that they were mainly chancers hoping for people without the knowledge to buy.

In circulated and excellent condition this coin could be worth around £2.50-£3, although on eBay you may get £5. This stirred my curiosity so I decided to look into other coins aside from rare 50p coins.

Following on from this I read an article about two rare 20p coins that had been picked up off eBay for £50. They were then valued at around £2000.

These coins were a minting error and are one-of-a-kind coins. The coins were stuck onto a blank 1p plate, which created a kind of rare bronze 20 pence coin.

The fact someone had 2 of these was quite astonishing.

This led me down a rabbit hole of information on the net. I was instantly hooked on searching for more rare 20p coins to add to my collection.

WHAT MAKES A COIN RARE?

So what makes a rare 20 pence coin or any coin for that matter? Well, there are a few things that can make a coin rare.

Production:

As with anything in life the more scarce the product the more valuable that product becomes. How many coins went into production plays a big role in the value of those coins.

Wait until the general public realises there are only going to be 21 million Bitcoins!!.

So we are looking for coins with a circulation of 10 million or less, which will make them fairly rare.

Errors

The other thing that can make rare 20p coins are coins that have an error. An error made during the minting of a coin can make it very rare. This does however depend on how many coins were minted with that error.

In 1982 for example The Royal Mint decided to change the wording on a 2 penny piece. Up until 1981, all 2p’s had the words New Pence inscribed on the reverse of the coin.

They then changed the wording to say Two Pence. In 1983 however, the Royal Mint then accidentally released a small number of coins that had the old inscription of “New Pence” on them.

These sorts of mistakes are more common than you think. Usually, they are spotted quite quickly which means they are rare in numbers which makes them a collector’s item.

How To Check If You Have Rare 20p Coins?

The first thing to do is to visit ChangeChecker. They have a big list of rare coins through their unique scarcity index, which is a scare index tracker for all British coins.

This scarcity index will give you a good idea of how rare your coin. It will also tell you if it has moved up or down this chart since the month before.

Check Your change is a good website to visit in order to find out if your coin is worth anything. They also have an app available on both the Apple Store and the Play Store so you can check your change on the go.

The Check Your Change UK coin App allows you to view all information for current circulating UK coins. As standard, you can toggle coins as ‘got’ or needed and use the colour-coded view to easily show what coins you need and which you already have.

You can also save a short text note for each coin, e.g. to keep a note of the condition, what you paid for the coin or where you found it etc.

The last way to check if your coin is rare or not is of course to search online websites such as eBay.

When you go onto eBay type in the name and date etc of your coin and then have a good search.

To get a realistic price of what your coin is selling for simply change the search function to show you just the sold items as this will give you a far better idea of what they sold for.

WHICH 20P COINS ARE VALUABLE?

So we are now down to the nitty-gritty of which coins are rare 20p coins. While some are worth a few pounds some of them are worth up to £50-£200. The most expensive is priced at between £700-£1000 but could fetch way more as the years go by as it appears to be a one-off.

THE BRONZE 20 PENCE

A genuine error on this coin made it one of the rarest 20p coins on the market. It was found by a collector of coins who noted that it was a weird bronze colour.

He sent it off to the royal mint for them to look at under x-ray fluorescence spectrometry.

They confirmed it was a genuine error coin and it had happened when a blank 1 penny found its way into the presses somehow and it got trapped between the blank silver 20 pence and the plate.

The coin was verified by the royal mint with an attached letter and the coin was brought by Change Checker and then put up as a prize in a commemorative box set.

This coin is thought to be worth in the region of £700-£1000 if it was put up for auction due to demand from other collectors.

THE NON-DATED 20 PENCE PIECE

In 2009 the Royal Mint made a monumental error, It was the first error of its kind to happen in over 300 years of producing coins at the mint so you can imagine how bad it was. This is one of the best rare 20p coins on the market.

The Royal Mint accidentally issued 200,000 20p coins without a date stamp. All coins have date stamps so this was a massive error. If you find one of these rare 20p coins you may want to keep it as they can be worth up to £70.

The date was always stamped on the reverse of the coin however this all changed with the newly designed coins and the date was meant to be stamped on the front of the coin, However, someone forgot on that particular day.

£70 is about average but if you have a mint one then it could be worth up to £200 for some collectors. A rare 20 pence indeed.

ISLE OF MAN 20 PENCE COIN

The Isle of Man rally which has been running since 1979 is an annual race which is now celebrated on some rare 20p coins from the Isle of Man.

The coins depict either the Subaru Impreza or Ford Cosworth rally cars.

In good condition, they can be worth around £15 or slightly higher if sold on eBay.

THE 1982 20 PENCE PIECE

1982 was the first year the 20 pence coin was introduced. Put into circulation was 740,815,000.

Quite a large amount and there has never been anywhere near that amount released each year since.

Nearly 40 years have passed so the amount of these coins in circulation has no doubt dwindled slightly. If you can find a mint one in your change then the price on eBay is around £5.

Although £5 is hardly going to have you searching your change box it is of course 25 times its face value. If kept for longer it may increase over the next few years.

THE GIBRALTAR 20 PENCE PIECE

The Gibraltar 20 pence piece is not a rare 20p however it is not legal tender in the UK which makes it a little more pricey.

These coins were first minted in 2005 and are still available. They feature a key design that harks back to the days when the city would lock four gates during storms to protect it from stormy seas.

If you find one and it is in good condition these coins can fetch around £3.

A LOOK AT HOW TO IDENTIFY RARE 20 PENCE COINS

If you think about the amount of change we carry in our pockets daily and the amount of change we keep in pots and savings jars at home is it any wonder that we can occasionally unearth some rare 20p coins?

Let’s hope this article inspires you to have a search through your change pots. Fingers crossed you come across a non-dated rare 20 pence coin.