A Georgia state bill solving the penny-rounding question was read into the Senate yesterday after beating the "crossover" deadline on Friday.
The Rounding Bill — HB 1112 — was debated in the House Banks & Banking Committee the previous week and now has a chance to make it into law.
“I talk to people every day who have no idea pennies have effectively been discontinued,” said Shelby Dotson, Executive Director of Georgia Retailers. “Everyone’s grandma has a pickle jar full of pennies — but they’re not in cash registers.”
The penny was officially discontinued from public minting on Nov. 12, but it still remains legal tender as with all other legal cash. But if you come to the store clerk with cash a few cents off your total, there is no standard that stores must acknowledge to make your purchase whole.
House Bill 1112 offers this solution:
- If you’re paying cash and the total ends with 1, 2, 6, or 7, the retailer must round your total down to the nearest nickel
- If it ends with a 3, 4, 8 or 9, they round up
- Sums ending with 0 or 5 stay the same
The bill is sponsored by Rep. Carter Barrett of Cumming, who mentioned today that others states such as Florida are in the process of passing similar bills.
“What we’re trying to do is get aligned with other states around us for convenience and clarity for our retailers,” he said.
And the absence of a rounding policy could lead to small discrepancies in cost that eventually add up for consumers if the stores decide to always round up. Rep. Carolyn Hugley recounted a visit to one retailer who refused to offer penny change on any purchase — and that didn’t sit right with her.
“If you keep everybody’s pennies,” she said, “somebody’s making money.”
It also represents risk for the retailers, who want to get ahead of any potential legal entanglements over the value of penny change in the absence of clear rules.
The topic began during Super Bowl LIX in February 2025 when President Donald Trump made a one-cent announcement on X: He had instructed the U.S. Treasury to cease the minting of relatively expensive pennies. (The one-cent coins cost 3.69 cents apiece to create, at last estimate, leading to an $85M-per-year loss for the government.)
The federal government so far has created no policy or guidance on rounding, but some states have. The Georgia Department of Revenue issued a bulletin aligned with HB 1112 in December, but that is only a guideline. Stores today are allowed to round all cash transactions up to the nearest nickel - in effect refusing to ever give pennies for change but keeping the difference on their books.
As Rep. Barrett noted, the rounding rule if applied would lead to no long-term advantage for the retailer or the consumer in the penny wars, saying, “it will generally all come out in the wash.”
In theory, the Law of Large Numbers should prevail.
The bill also stipulates that no additional tax revenue be created from rounding, that stores may continue to honor exact change and accept pennies from consumers, and that no changes will be made to digital transactions.
There is also a stipulation barring rounding from totals of less than a nickel, so don’t get any ideas about gaming this system.