A rare 20p coin is being sold for nearly £1,000 - could you have one in your pocket?

Do you have a rare 20p in your pocket? (Photo: Shutterstock)Do you have a rare 20p in your pocket? (Photo: Shutterstock)
Do you have a rare 20p in your pocket? (Photo: Shutterstock)

A rare coin is being sold on eBay for almost £1,000 pounds due to a minting error acknowledged by the Royal Mint in 2008.

Could you have a 20p worth hundreds of pounds hiding in your wallet?

Rare minting error

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The eBay seller explains: “This is a genuine 20p British coin that has a rare minting error where it has no date on either side.”

The coin is being sold for £950, with the listing explaining that the seller has increased the price because they were told that people didn’t think it was real because it wasn’t expensive enough.

Other undated 20p coins are also being sold on eBay for similar prices, ranging from £49 to £1,150.

Undated 20p coins

The Royal Mint explains that in November, 2008, a number of 20p coins were incorrectly minted, resulting in the coins being undated.

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This issue affected less than 250,000 coins of the 136 million 20p pieces that were minted in 2008-09. These coins are still legal tender, and continue to have a face value of 20p.

The undated 20p is one of the rarest coins in circulation, and the error was the first mistake that the Royal Mint has made with dates in over 300 years.

Rare and valuable coins

There are a number of other coins that could be worth many times their value - do you have any of these lying around?

According to Change Checker, the 2017 Sir Isaac Newton 50p is the second rarest 50p coin in circulation, after the 2009 Kew Gardens 50p.

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The Kew Gardens coin was released to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Gardens, and the coins have been seen to sell for up to £160 on eBay.

Last year, a rare 1983 2p coin sold for £300 on eBay. The coin was rare because between 1971 and 1981, all 2p coins had the words “New Pence” inscribed on them, but in 1982, the Royal Mint decided to amend this to say “Two Pence” instead.

After this decision was implemented, in 1983, the Royal Mint accidentally produced a small number of coins that bore the old inscription of “New Pence” instead of “Two Pence”.

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