Collectors of vintage United States coins know just how challenging it can be to locate mintmarked issues of the early 20th century. This seems to be especially true for S-mintmarked coins of that period. So it’s little surprise that in a series like the Standing Liberty Quarter, a workhorse coin of its day, that a lower-mintage San Francisco emission is not only seldom seen but also highly valuable – regardless of grade. Certainly this is the case with the 1923-S Standing Liberty Quarter, which is one of the toughest issues in the entire series that spanned from 1916 through 1930.
The 1923-S Standing Liberty Quarter saw only 1,360,000 strikes, a mintage sufficient for its time given that the nation was still emerging from a post-World War I recession that hampered the need for copious coin production then. A gander across the various U.S. denominations in 1923 reveals anemic mintage figures across the board, particularly for the San Francisco coinage. But consider how much use the quarter saw in commerce, then take a look at values for 1923-S Quarters, and it quickly becomes evident how relatively few of these coins were saved by collectors in any condition.
PCGS estimates that fewer than a combined 9,000 examples of the 1923-S Quarter exist across all grades and encompassing both Full Head (FH) and non-FH-designated strikes. That’s a tiny fraction of that 1-plus million that once enumerated the entire number of strikes that existed for this coin. Tie those numbers into the demand for the Standing Liberty Quarter, which is widely collected as both a type coin and a date-and-mintmark series objective, and the overall scarceness and value behind the 1923-S Standing Liberty Quarter becomes even clearer.
An example of the 1923-S Quarter in G4 fetches some $400 according to the PCGS Price Guide. That figure may seem affordable when compared to the $1,500+ this same coin takes in a grade of PCGS XF40. The coin crosses the threshold of $4,000 in MS63, and a nice MS65FH example garners $10,500. The all-time price record for a 1923-S Standing Liberty Quarter was realized by a PCGS MS67+FH specimen that hammered for $48,469 in a 2013 Stack’s Bowers Galleries auction.