what is a nickel worth today

[DelLily]

Well, that depends entirely on who you're asking! If you ask a cashier, a vending machine, or your piggy bank, a nickel is worth exactly five cents. It’s the steadfast, reliable workhorse of pocket change, ready to buy you one-twentieth of a dollar's worth of goods.

However, if you ask a commodities trader with a spreadsheet and a gleam in their eye, the answer gets a bit more complicated and a lot more interesting. You see, the humble Jefferson nickel isn't actually made of pure nickel. According to its specifications, it's a scrappy blend of 75% copper and 25% nickel.

Thanks to the ever-fluctuating global market for metals, the value of that metallic recipe can get spicy. When the prices for copper and nickel get high enough, the melt value of the coin—the raw worth of the metal it contains—can actually sneak past its five-cent face value. For brief, exciting moments in economic history, your nickel is technically worth more as a tiny metal disc than as legal tender.

So, a nickel today is worth five cents. But it's also a tiny, metallic stock portfolio of copper and nickel that's sometimes worth more. Just don't get any ideas about melting it down; the U.S. government tends to frown upon that.