The United States Mint opened sales on its Best of the Mint 1804 Silver Dollar Gold Coin and Silver Medal Set on August 27 at noon Eastern, priced at $5,740 under item number 26BM4. The set carries a mintage limit of 15,000 and a household order limit of one for the first 24 hours.
It is the fourth of five sets in the Mint’s semiquincentennial Best of the Mint program, and it is the only one whose source coin has never been rendered in modern gold before. The Mercury dime, the Standing Liberty quarter and the Walking Liberty half have all had earlier gold treatments. The 1804 dollar has not. For the first time, the coin B. Max Mehl christened the King of American Coins exists in a form a collector can actually order.
Why the 1804 Silver Dollar Was Never Struck in 1804
The central fact about the 1804 dollar is that it is not from 1804. Mint records show a silver dollar mintage of 19,570 pieces for that year, but those coins almost certainly carried the 1803 date, struck from dies held over into the new calendar year in the ordinary practice of the early Philadelphia Mint.
The coins bearing the 1804 date came thirty years later. In 1834 and 1835, the Mint prepared presentation sets of United States coinage for the State Department, intended as diplomatic gifts for rulers in Asia who might grant trade concessions. The brief called for specimens of each denomination then in use, and the dollar had not been struck for circulation in decades, so the Mint made new ones and dated them 1804. Envoy Edmund Roberts carried the sets abroad. Two are known to have been delivered, one to Said bin Sultan of Muscat in 1835 and one to King Rama III of Siam in 1836. Roberts died before the mission was finished.
Those eight coins are the Class I originals. The rest of the story is less official. Around 1858 and 1859, Mint employees struck further examples off the books and moved them quietly into the hands of dealers. One of those, the unique Class II, was overstruck on a Swiss shooting thaler and left with a plain edge; it sits today in the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection. Seven Class III coins are now known, one more than the hobby counted two years ago, after an unrecorded example surfaced in the James A. Stack, Sr. Collection. Graded Proof-65 by PCGS with CAC and CMQ approval, it brought $6 million at Stack’s Bowers Galleries on December 9, 2025, a record for the issue. Only the finest known Class I has done better, at $7.68 million in August 2021.
Sixteen coins, then, across three classes, half of them permanently out of reach. That is the shadow the new set is working in.
Inside the 2026 1804 Silver Dollar Gold Coin
The gold coin holds one troy ounce of 99.99% fine gold, struck at West Point with an uncirculated finish, 30.61 mm across. The Mint bills it as a high relief strike. The obverse reproduces Robert Scot’s draped bust of Liberty facing right, her long hair bound by a ribbon, flanked by 13 stars, with LIBERTY above and 1804 below. Set into that field is a Liberty Bell privy mark carrying the numeral 250, the marker the whole Best of the Mint program shares.
The reverse carries the heraldic eagle: raised wings, a United States shield on its breast, a scroll in its beak reading E PLURIBUS UNUM, 13 arrows in the right talon and an olive branch in the left, clouds and 13 stars above, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA around the rim.
The detail worth pausing on is the edge. The Mint has reproduced the original lettering, HUNDRED CENTS ONE DOLLAR OR UNIT, in raised form. On the historic coins that edge is not decoration. It is evidence. The presence or absence of edge lettering, and the way it was applied, is part of how the three classes were sorted out in the first place, and it is why the plain edge Class II stands alone. Reproducing it on a 2026 gold strike is a quiet nod to the attribution work rather than the design.
Two smaller notes for the specification readers. The gold coin carries a face value of one dollar, which is what the original denomination requires and what an ounce of gold makes faintly absurd. And the Mint lists no mintmark on either piece, a departure from the W that appeared on earlier gold coins in the series.
The 1804 Silver Dollar Companion Silver Medal
The one ounce silver medal, 99.9% fine and struck at Philadelphia at 40.60 mm, does not copy the coin. It takes the diplomatic voyage as its subject. The ribbon in Liberty’s hair on the 1804 dollar becomes flowing ribbon like hair on the medal’s obverse. The clouds arcing above the eagle on the historic reverse are reworked twice over, into the braid encircling Liberty’s head and into the band around a globe on the medal’s reverse. Thirteen stars stand for the original colonies and the Sun for national aspiration. Inscriptions are LIBERTY, 2026 and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
It is the better piece of design thinking in the set. The gold coin is a faithful reproduction and can only be that. The medal gets to say something the original never could, which is that these coins were made to travel.
Best of the Mint 1804 Silver Dollar Set Specifications
| Gold Coin | Silver Medal | |
|---|---|---|
| Composition | 99.99% gold | 99.9% silver |
| Weight | 1.000 troy ounce | 1.000 troy ounce |
| Diameter | 30.61 mm (1.205 in) | 40.60 mm (1.598 in) |
| Finish | Uncirculated | Uncirculated |
| Edge | Raised lettering | Plain |
| Mint | West Point | Philadelphia |
| Mintmark | None | None |
| Denomination | $1 | N/A |
Item number 26BM4. Mintage limit 15,000 sets. No product limit. Household order limit of one for the first 24 hours. Issue price $5,740, set under the Mint’s precious metals pricing table and subject to weekly revision.
Price, Mintage and How the Set Compares to the Series
Gold weight has tracked denomination through the whole program, which is a tidier bit of series design than the Mint has been given credit for. The Mercury dime set carried a tenth of an ounce at $810. The Standing Liberty quarter took a quarter ounce at $1,540. The Walking Liberty half took half an ounce at $2,775. A dollar takes the full ounce, and the price follows.
Two things break the pattern here. The mintage limit is 15,000, half the 30,000 ceiling applied to the first three sets. And the $5,740 price puts this set roughly two and a half times above the last one, which changes who is in the room. The earlier releases sold in very different ways: the Mercury dime set went unavailable in under five hours and finished at 28,933 sets against its cap, while the Standing Liberty quarter moved at a steadier 14,101 in four days and stayed available. Backorder status inside 24 hours on the most expensive set in the series suggests the halved mintage is doing real work.
What Comes Next: The 1907 Saint-Gaudens Finale
The program closes on September 24, when the Best of the Mint 1907 Saint-Gaudens High Relief $20 Gold Coin and Silver Medal Set goes on sale at noon Eastern, also in one ounce of 24 karat gold. Collectors building the full run have one release left and, for many of them, the harder of the two budget decisions already behind them.
What the 1804 set actually offers is not rarity. Fifteen thousand of anything is not rare, and the premium over metal buys packaging, a privy mark and a place in a five set series. What it offers is proximity. Sixteen genuine 1804 dollars exist, three of them impounded in institutions and the rest changing hands at prices that put them among the six most expensive federal coins ever sold in this country. Until this week, owning the design in any officially struck form was not on the table for anyone outside that circle. It is now, and that is a stranger thing for the Mint to have done than the price tag makes it look.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was the 1804 silver dollar actually struck in 1804? No. The Mint’s 19,570 piece dollar mintage recorded for 1804 was almost certainly struck from 1803 dated dies. The coins bearing the 1804 date were made in 1834 and later.
How many 1804 silver dollars exist? Sixteen: eight Class I originals, one Class II, and seven Class III. The count stood at fifteen until an unrecorded Class III surfaced in the James A. Stack, Sr. Collection in 2025.
Is the 2026 gold coin a real 1804 dollar? No. It is a 2026 struck gold reissue of the 1804 design, carrying a Liberty Bell privy mark with the numeral 250 and a face value of one dollar. Genuine 1804 dollars are silver.
How much is the Best of the Mint 1804 set? $5,740 at release, for one troy ounce of gold and one troy ounce of silver. The Mint adjusts gold product prices weekly against the market.
When is the last Best of the Mint set released? September 24, 2026, at noon Eastern. The 1907 Saint-Gaudens High Relief $20 set closes the series in one ounce of 24 karat gold.
