From Poor to Mint State: The 10 Coin-Grading Tiers, Explained

Coin dealers, auction listings, and price guides all lean on a shorthand vocabulary — "VF," "AU," "MS-65" — that's meaningless until someone explains what each term is actually pointing at. The good news is that the whole system, the Sheldon scale, boils down to ten plain-language tiers describing how much wear a coin has and how much of its original detail survives. Here's what each one means, worked through from the bottom up.

Poor (P-1) and Fair (FR-2)

At the bottom of the scale, a coin is often barely identifiable — you can tell its type and maybe its date, but most of the design has worn to a smooth outline. These grades usually apply to coins that were in heavy circulation for decades, sometimes centuries, or to coins with real damage (holes, heavy corrosion). A Poor or Fair grade almost always means the coin's value rests entirely on its rarity, since there's little detail left to appreciate.

About Good (AG-3)

One step up: the major design elements are outlined and recognizable, even though fine detail is long gone. Letters in the legend may be worn nearly smooth, and the rim may be worn into the design itself. Still a heavily circulated coin, but a slightly more presentable one than Poor or Fair.

Good (G-4 to G-6)

Despite the name, "Good" is still a low grade — it just means the coin's design and legends are fully visible, if flat and worn. This is the grade most commonly associated with well-worn coins that stayed in circulation their entire working life: readable, complete, but with almost no fine detail remaining. For scarcer coins, Good is often the highest grade collectors will ever find, and it's a perfectly respectable grade to own.

Very Good (VG-7 to VG-10)

Some major details start to reappear at this tier — enough that you can make out individual design elements, even though they're still flat and shallow. Think of it as the midpoint between "the design is a silhouette" and "the design has real depth."

Fine (F-11 to F-15)

Moderate to considerable wear, but every major design element is now clearly visible, and you can usually make out some of the finer details too — hair strands on a portrait, feather details on an eagle. Fine-grade coins are often the sweet spot for type collectors who want a presentable, complete example without paying a premium for condition.

Very Fine (VF-16 to VF-35)

This is the widest tier on the scale — twenty points — because it covers a real range of remaining detail, from coins with light-to-moderate wear that still show most fine details sharply, up toward coins bordering on Extremely Fine. A Very Fine coin looks genuinely good to the naked eye; the wear is confined mostly to the highest points of the design.

Extremely Fine (XF/EF-36 to XF-45)

Wear is now limited to just the very highest points of the design — the cheek on a portrait, the top of a wing, the peak of a letter. Everything else remains sharp. Coins at this grade were in circulation only briefly, or handled carefully, before being set aside.

About Uncirculated (AU-46 to AU-58)

A trace of wear — sometimes visible only under magnification — on the highest points, but most of the coin's original mint luster is still present. AU coins occupy an interesting middle ground: technically "used," but close enough to uncirculated that, at a glance, many people can't tell the difference. This is often where the price curve starts climbing steeply, since AU coins are the last stop before true Mint State.

Why collectors target specific grades

Different collecting goals point toward different target grades on this scale, and knowing your own goal early avoids paying for condition you don't actually need. A type collector building one representative example of every design across history is usually well served by Very Fine or Extremely Fine coins -- presentable, complete, and dramatically cheaper than uncirculated examples of the same type. A date-and-mint-mark collector chasing a complete run of a specific series often needs to accept whatever grade is realistically available for the scarcest dates, even if it's far lower than the grade they're buying for the common dates in the same set. And a condition-focused collector specifically hunting Mint State or Proof examples is playing an entirely different game, where the gap between adjacent grades (as covered in a companion piece on this site comparing MS-63 to MS-65) matters more than almost anything else about the coin.

Mint State / Proof (MS-59 to MS-70)

No trace of circulation wear at all. This top tier spans from a baseline uncirculated coin with noticeable bag marks and average luster (MS-60) all the way to a technically flawless example (MS-70) — an eleven-point range where marks, luster, strike quality, and eye appeal do all the differentiating work. (A companion article on this site walks through exactly what separates an MS-63 from an MS-65 within this tier.)

Using the scale in practice

You don't need to memorize every numeric boundary — the Coin Grading Scale Guide looks up any number 1 through 70 and returns its tier instantly. What's worth internalizing is the shape of the scale: it moves from "barely identifiable" through "complete but worn" through "trace of wear" and finally to "no wear at all," with the Very Fine and Mint State tiers doing the most work because that's where the most coins — and the most collector attention — actually land.

Frequently asked questions

Are these ten tiers the same as the exact 70-point Sheldon scale? They map onto it, but the official scale historically used specific discrete numbers within some tiers (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20...) rather than every integer. This guide's bands cover every number 1-70 continuously for a simpler, plain-language lookup -- useful for understanding what tier a number falls in, though official third-party grading may use additional named points and +/- distinctions within a tier.

Which tier should a beginner aim for? There's no universally right answer -- it depends on budget and goals. Fine to Very Fine offers presentable, complete coins at a fraction of Mint State prices, and is a common, sensible starting point for anyone building a broad type set.

Proof coins: a different production process, not just a grade

It's worth separating two things that sound related but aren't: "Proof" isn't simply the top of the Mint State range -- it's a distinct manufacturing process, using specially polished dies and planchets struck multiple times for maximum sharpness, historically intended for collectors and presentation rather than circulation. A Proof coin is graded on the same 60-70 numeric scale as a business-strike Mint State coin (hence grades like "PF-69" or "PR-69" using the same numbers), but the "PF" or "PR" prefix signals a different production method entirely, and Proof and Mint State examples of the same date are generally valued, bought, and sold as separate categories rather than compared directly against each other.

Does a coin's tier alone tell you its value? No -- grade is one input alongside rarity and demand. A common coin in a high tier can be worth less than a genuinely rare coin in a low one.

How grades actually appear in real listings

In practice, you'll rarely see a bare number -- dealer listings and auction catalogs combine the letter-number designation with a plain description, like "1921 Morgan Dollar, MS-63 (Choice Uncirculated)" or "1943 Steel Cent, VF-25 (Very Fine)." The parenthetical plain-language term is exactly the kind of mapping this guide provides, and getting comfortable reading both the number and the tier name together -- rather than treating them as two separate things to memorize -- is what makes browsing real listings and auction results actually legible.