The End of the Penny: Should Your Dental Office Go Cashless?
Does your dental office still accept cash, and if so, are you planning to keep making change with pennies because the penny has reached the end of its production life. On November 12, 2025, the U.S. Mint struck the final one cent coin intended for circulation, ending 232 years of continuous production. The economics had become hard to defend. A coin worth one cent cost 3.69 cents to manufacture. Existing pennies remain legal tender and will continue circulating, but no new supply is entering everyday commerce.
For dental practices, the immediate question is not whether America is going cashless. It is whether handling cash still makes sense at the front desk.
The U.S. Treasury has already outlined a practical path for businesses that continue accepting cash. When pennies are unavailable, the final cash total may be rounded to the nearest nickel. Electronic payments remain exact to the cent. A patient balance of $487.43, for example, could be settled at $487.45 in cash while remaining $487.43 by card. That means the end of penny production does not require a dental office to stop accepting cash. It simply makes small change less convenient.
Cash itself is far from dead. Federal Reserve data show that cash still accounts for about 14 percent of U.S. consumer payments. Four out of five consumers reported using cash during the previous month, and 90 percent said they expected to keep using it. The long trend is clearly digital, but the transition is slower and messier than the headlines suggest.
The same lesson appears overseas. Sweden is one of the most digitally oriented economies in the world, yet it still issues six banknotes and four coins. Its central bank has gone so far as to recommend that households keep physical cash available for emergencies because digital payment systems can fail during power outages, cyberattacks, communications failures, and other disruptions. Jamaica has introduced JAM DEX, a central bank digital currency, while continuing to circulate paper money and coins. No sovereign country has yet eliminated physical currency entirely and forced all payments into a digital system.
Dental practices, however, do not have to wait for a country to go cashless before making their own decision. Some already have. Marin Modern Dentistry in California does not accept cash, although it still accepts checks. Spaulding Dental Co. in Washington also refuses cash. Sagewood Dental in Wisconsin has announced a cashless payment policy built around cards and online payments. Holistic Dental Arts in Texas goes further, refusing both cash and checks while accepting cards, Apple Pay, Zelle, and financing.
The appeal is easy to understand. A cashless office eliminates the cash drawer. Nobody has to stock coins, make change, count currency at the end of the day, reconcile physical money against the schedule, or take deposits to the bank. Every patient payment should leave an electronic trail. For a practice owner who has experienced employee theft, that audit trail can feel especially attractive.
But this is where the discussion needs discipline. Eliminating cash removes cash skimming. It does not eliminate embezzlement.
A dishonest employee does not need a twenty dollar bill to steal from a dental practice. Fraud can move into refunds, write offs, adjustments, payroll, accounts payable, insurance checks, vendor payments, merchant accounts, or practice management software. An employee with broad access can create false credits, alter ledgers, direct refunds, conceal collections, or manipulate financial reports without ever opening a cash drawer.
That is why internal controls matter more than the payment medium. The person collecting or posting payments should not be the same person reconciling the bank account. Refunds and adjustments should be reviewed. Merchant deposits should be matched against the practice management system. Payroll and vendor payments should receive independent oversight. Banking credentials should remain under owner control. Going cashless can make those controls easier to audit, but it cannot substitute for them.
There is also a patient side to the equation. Refusing cash may simplify operations, but it creates friction for some patients, particularly older adults, lower income households, and people who simply prefer physical money. A practice should know its own patient base before copying a cashless office in another market. What works in a high income suburban practice may not work the same way in a rural, Medicaid heavy, senior, or immigrant population.
Digital payments bring their own costs and failure points. Card processing fees can be substantial. Chargebacks happen. Cards are stolen. Accounts are compromised. Payment networks go down. One cashless Texas practice charges a 3 percent credit card processing fee, which shows that removing cash does not remove payment costs. It changes where those costs appear.
There is also a legal layer. Federal law does not generally require private businesses to accept cash, but states and local governments can create their own rules. A practice considering a cashless policy should confirm what applies in its jurisdiction before posting a sign at the front desk.
Start with the practice, not the trend. Measure how much cash you currently collect. Count the staff time spent handling and reconciling it. Review how often patients ask to pay in cash. Look at processing fees, theft exposure, bank runs, refund controls, and the demographics of your patient base. If almost nobody uses cash, going cashless may reduce friction inside the office with little downside. If a meaningful share of patients still pays with currency, rounding cash transactions to the nearest nickel may be the simpler solution.
The penny is a good news hook because it signals that payment behavior is changing. The deeper question for dentistry is operational. Does accepting cash still provide enough value to patients to justify the handling, reconciliation, security, and control burden it creates?
Should your dental office still accept cash?
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