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There is a widely circulated claim that 1971 minimum U.S. wage -- when paid in silver quarters -- would significantly exceed the current nominally higher minimum wage.

In 1971, the Federal minimum wage was $1.60 per hour, enough to buy 6 1/2 silver quarters (90% silver).

In 2025, those same 6 1/2 silver quarters have a melt value of about $53. Today's minimum wage is $7.25 per hour...not even enough to buy one silver quarter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Silverbugs/comments/1nymza3/more_people_need_to_understand_this/

Or in a similar vein,

In 1964, the minimum wage was five 90% silver quarters.

In 2021 five 90% silver quarters have a melt value of $23.34. We don't need minimum wages. We need sound money.

https://moneymetalsexchange.medium.com/2021-meme-reveals-the-relentless-devaluation-of-your-money-4ada09f59862

enter image description here

Are these claims factually accurate?

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    I know the minimum wage angle is trying to imply a lot more, but I think the actual claim here is just that the price of silver has gone up by a certain percent over the last 50-60 years? Commented 17 hours ago
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    According to wikipedia, 90% silver quarters haven't been minted since 1964. So what is this actually about, using your wage to buy collector edition coins from past times? Because such coins will not follow any consumer index at all... Commented 17 hours ago
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    @Giter, sort of. Was that actually minimum wage? Is that the prices of silver? Is that silver content of these coins? Are these coins in circulation? Is this misleading for any other reasons? Etc. Commented 16 hours ago
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    I know I am tired, but I am having trouble parsing this claim, especially the title. Have I got this right? "Do the silver quarters you could exchange for 1 hour's minimum wage in 1971 [when they were still legal currency] contain $53 worth of silver in 2025?" (with an implied claim that minimum wage hasn't kept up and/or inflation has greatly devalued the dollar). Commented 16 hours ago
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    "In 1993, the Federal US minimum wage was $4.25 an hour, enough to purchase nearly two booster packs of Alpha Magic the Gathering (MSRP $2.45). In 2025, those same two Alpha booster packs cost $40,000; today's minimum wage can't even buy one!" Commented 14 hours ago

1 Answer 1

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Using "silver quarter" as a reference is confusing overall, since that apparently mainly refers to Washington quarters minted until year 1964 that did indeed have 90% silver. You wouldn't be able to buy 90% silver quarters for your wage in 1971 nor in 2025, unless of course you went to buy old coins that will have a significant collector value far beyond the silver price. So using them as reference is already strange... and to add further to the confusion, there are also Bullion coins which have different values and purity still.

The silver price is not necessarily following the consumer index, that is the average price for food and goods. Since the 1960s, the whole electronics industry has emerged, and also a growing chemistry industry, making silver much more valuable than in the past, when it was mainly used for vanity items. Silver as an investment claims that 40% of all silver use today is industrial. That wouldn't have been the case back in the 1960s - you can see how silver has become far more valuable since then in the graph further below.

Furthermore, gold and silver are nowadays popular for "day trading" investments, making their prices go up in times of trouble and regular stock market instability. So there's not really much relevance to measure your wage in silver - most people don't blow their wage on silver. In fact the overwhelming majority of employed humans (approximately 100%) tend to spend part of their wages on food. So it would make more sense to use some every day food item like milk or grain etc, or better yet a bag of food containing some 20 common food items. That would also take inflation in account, unlike silver which doesn't necessarily follow the inflation of any particular currency.

As of today 2025, the melt value of a 1964 Washington silver quarter is $9. According to this site the melt value of a silver quarter in 2021 was approximately $5.5, see this graph:

enter image description here

So yeah that's similar to the claim in your second link, however we can clearly spot some troubled times in this graph, like the financial crisis of 2008 or the Covid pandemic of 2020. There is no relation between low minimum wages and the high silver prices due to the on-going Covid pandemic in 2021.

Now compare that to US consumer price index during the pandemic:

enter image description here

There was a notable inflation starting around 2020 during the pandemic.

From all of this, I think we can at least make the conclusion that there is no correlation between what you will get for your wage in USD compared to the price of silver.

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    The melt value graph is very suspect considering that silver reached $49.45 per troy ounce on 1/18/1980. That would be over $200 in current dollars. Commented 12 hours ago
  • macrotrends.net/1470/historical-silver-prices-100-year-chart Commented 12 hours ago
  • I was a high-schooler in 1971, beginning activities like paid work and buying some things on my own, and I can testify quarters from 1964 (and back to at least 1960) were still in wide use at face value, with only uncirculated, proof, or mis-struck items commanding any premium. @DavePhD: also there are two separate horizontal bars for '$0', and the years aren't anywhere near linear. Commented 6 hours ago
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    There are a million things wrong with the "silver quarter melt value over time" graph from wrong axes to nonsense data. I assume it was made with faulty AI. Please replace it with an accurate graph instead. Commented 3 hours ago
  • @NoseKnowsAll is correct. Looking at macrotrends.net/1470/historical-silver-prices-100-year-chart we can see that it is missing the rather notable silver price spike in 1980, nominally caused by the Hunt brothers attempt to corner the market. Commented 59 mins ago

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