When did half dollars stop circulating?

Basically, three reasons that basically happened at once:
Rising price of silver meant that eventually silver coins would have more than their face value worth of silver in them, so they had take silver out. So people were saving half dollars because of that.
Kennedy had just died, so people were saving rather than spending Kennedy halves for that reason.
It was a new coin design, so people were saving rather than spending half dollars for that reason.

Eventually people got used to half dollars not being around, used the slot for spare rolls of change, and they started making cash drawers that didn't have a slot for half dollars anymore.

Half dollars were still around, technically, but people got used to not using them and treated them as a novelty the few times they saw them.

Casinos still had quite a few, mainly for slot machines and low stakes blackjack tables and such. But eventually casinos moved to tokens, and then later cards, so even there you didn't see them much anymore.

My father said before 1964 it was really no stranger to get a half dollar in change than a penny. But they quickly fell out of circulation in 1964 and by the 1970's it was extremely rare to even see one.

These days it's not uncommon to meet people that don't even know the US even mints half dollars at all.

Technically they never truly disappeared from circulation; they still make them after all, and they're still legal tender of course, but none were minted with the intent to circulate in 1970, 1987, 2002-2022 and probably again this year they're not intended to circulate. But from 1964 on they quickly became a rare sight in circulation.

 

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I dug mother-in-law's out again (see above). As you can see, the Kennedy halves circulated into Thailand at least until 1981. Some seemed to have circulated a bit, especially one of the 1976's. I wonder if there was something with halves being used more in the military (PX or something, there are/were bases there).





Here's that 1959-D I mentioned above, pulled from the register at the ice cream parlor somewhere in the 1974-1977 period. It saw a lot of circulation. My own accumulation ends at 1976, but I probably saved the bicentennials from my pillaging of the clad ones in 1983 when I was broke. Two halves bought me a pack of cigarettes in those days, so it was still a useful coin. I know for a fact that cigs were $0.85 a pack in 1980 and probably still $1 or so by 1983. Filthy habit.

 

A bag lady panhandled me in a store and I gave her two half-dollars. She thanked me, walked off and then turned and asked "Are these dollar coins"

 

I got one in change last week

 

The Walkers are all worn because in those days a half was a very common circulating coin. Once the value of a half was reduced, inflation etc. And these days, there isn't even a slot for it in the cash register. Most vending machines do not accept them because they are too large. There is no point cluttering up your pocket with these large/heavy coins that have almost no buying power, when you could carry a dollar bill instead of 2 of these sewer covers. The Kennedy's were NIFC from 2002- 2021 but they have been produced for circulation since. When they stopped minting the penny, they should have stopped minting these extinct dinosaur coins.

 

Yeah, I love the half-dollar denomination, but I don't expect to see it as circulating money again in my lifetime. But then again, I expect to see an effective end to all circulating coins in my lifetime.