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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 710983, member: 11668&quot;]Good place to start looking, yes.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>In the U.S., the law specifically prohibits minting &quot;backdated&quot; coins.&nbsp; The Mint is required to destroy all of a year&#039;s dated dies on December 31 of that year.&nbsp; (This law was passed in response to a minor scandal involving Mint employees saving old dies so that they could sell &quot;rare date&quot; coins to collectors, usually for their own profit rather than the Treasury&#039;s.)</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>But there&#039;s no law saying the coins can&#039;t be dated *ahead*.&nbsp; Thus, for circulating coins, the Mint usually schedules production so that they&#039;ll run out of current-year dies in mid-December.&nbsp; That way, if their projections are off a bit and the old dies last a little longer than expected, they still won&#039;t get stuck with a bunch of perfectly good dies that they&#039;ve got to throw out on December 31.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>As already mentioned in this thread, the bullion coins are typically switched over to the new date even sooner, so that a stockpile of next year&#039;s coins will be ready for release on January 2.&nbsp; By tradition, those coins are never actually issued before the new year, even though there&#039;s no law saying they can&#039;t be.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>For the first few years of the State quarters, the Mint was following the same practice as for the bullion coins: the first quarter of 2001 went into production around November 2000, for example, so that it could be released in quantity as soon as January 2001 arrived.&nbsp; They quit doing that around 2004, if I remember correctly: the 2004 Michigan quarter didn&#039;t go into production until 2004, so it was released in late January rather than the first week of January.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The Cheerios coins were another quirk; they were dated 2000 but minted in mid-1999, to allow time for packaging and distribution.&nbsp; A few of the cereal boxes containing the coins actually reached store shelves in the last days of December 1999, making these a rare exception to the tradition of not allowing coins to get out before their year date.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>There&#039;ve been exceptions in the other direction too, but they&#039;ve required specific Congressional authorization in order to get around the no-backdating law.&nbsp; Unless I&#039;m forgetting one, the most recent was the Thomas Jefferson commemorative silver dollar: it was struck in 1994, but dated 1993, so that it would have the appropriate anniversary dates 1743-1993.&nbsp; The law authorizing this coin explicitly required that it be dated 1993 (basically, in order to cover for the fact that Congress took so long to pass the legislation that the Mint could no longer get the coins into production while it was still 1993).&nbsp; Absent such specific authority, we get coins like the Capitol Visitor Center program dated 1800-2001: it would&#039;ve made a lot more sense if it&#039;d come out in 2000, but it didn&#039;t, and the Mint wasn&#039;t allowed to backdate it since Congress didn&#039;t say they could.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>And of course, as others have mentioned, other countries follow completely different practices.&nbsp; Some routinely issue commemoratives backdated by a year or several; others routinely issue bullion coins dated the following year, like the Canadian ones that started this discussion.&nbsp; When the euro coins went into production in 1999, to be released in 2002, some nations&#039; laws required their coins to be dated in the year minted, while other nations&#039; laws required them to be dated in the year of intended issue--so you can find euros dated 1999, 2000, and 2001 from some countries but not from others.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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