The Senate passed the Common Cents Act on Friday night, and once the House signs off on a small change the senators made, the arithmetic at the register becomes federal law for anyone paying cash. A total ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7 cents gets rounded down to the nearest nickel; a total ending in 3, 4, 8 or 9 cents gets rounded up, and the rounding applies only to cash, and only after taxes and fees are added. Pay by card, check or phone and nothing changes — you are charged the exact amount, down to the cent.
Rounding is an option, not an order. Businesses may round when they cannot make exact change, but they are not required to, and merchants that adopt the practice get legal safe-harbor protection for doing it. That protection is the reason retailers pushed for the bill in the first place.
The problem it solves is one that has been building at cash registers since the Mint stopped striking pennies. Retailers large and small have been warning customers that exact change is unlikely on cash purchases, and they have handled the shortfall inconsistently — some handing out gift cards or free items, others simply rounding the total. Several states and localities bar businesses from rounding cash transactions in either direction, which left a chain operating across state lines with no safe way to do the same thing everywhere.
Evan Armstrong, senior vice president of government affairs at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, said more than a dozen states have moved ahead with their own versions of rounding legislation, and the federal bill “gives a singular, uniform approach around rounding” that replaces the patchwork. The National Retail Federation called the measure an overdue step toward letting retailers keep serving cash customers as penny supply and usage dwindle. Sean Kennedy, chief advocacy officer at the National Restaurant Association, said Senate passage delivers “the certainty, consistency, and protection restaurant operators need” at the point of sale.
The vote itself moved fast. Senators cleared the bill Friday evening through a hotline process, polling each member for sign-off so the legislation could advance without floor time. The Banking Committee was discharged by unanimous consent, and the measure passed with an amendment, also by unanimous consent. The change came from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and requires the Treasury Department to notify Congress before discontinuing any currency in the future and to submit a transition plan. Because the Senate altered the text, the House has to vote on it a second time, and retail trade groups are aiming to get the bill to President Trump in September.
The legislation also settles the penny’s status permanently. Treasury would have to end all penny production within a year of enactment, while pennies already in circulation stay legal tender indefinitely. The Federal Reserve would be tasked with limiting disruptions in penny supply during the wind-down. Roughly 114 billion pennies remain in existence, by Treasury’s estimate.
The second half of the bill is about the coin shoppers will be handed instead. The nickel loses money on every strike. It cost 13.31 cents to produce a nickel in fiscal 2025, down slightly from 13.78 cents the year before, and fiscal 2025 marked the twentieth straight year that production costs ran above the coin’s face value. The culprit is copper: a nickel contains very little of the metal it is named for and is roughly 75% copper.
The fix on offer is a cheaper recipe. The bill permits a five-cent coin built with an inner layer of zinc and an outer layer of nickel, with the Treasury secretary allowed to set the exact proportions only after testing shows the new composition cuts cost and, as the text puts it, has “minimal adverse impact on machines designed to accept coins.” That last clause was written in for vending machine operators, convenience store chains and laundromats, whose coin acceptors read a coin’s weight and electromagnetic signature. A copper-nickel five-cent piece must weigh five grams, but the zinc version could weigh anywhere from four to six, giving Treasury room to tune the coin so existing equipment still recognizes it. Zinc ran nearly $7,000 per metric ton cheaper than copper last year, according to the Mint.
Nothing changes in anyone’s pocket yet. The bill permits the new nickel rather than ordering it, and Treasury would still need to test and validate the composition before a zinc-core nickel reaches circulation, putting 2027 at the earliest realistic window. The nickel itself is not going away; a separate bill to eliminate it remains stuck in House committee. The immediate business consequence is narrower and more useful: a single national rule for making change, ending the state-by-state legal exposure that has been hanging over every cash sale since the last penny was struck.
JBizNews Desk | Washington
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