A man was given an ultra-rare coin worth up to $1,000 in his lunch change

• A rare coin found in a man's change is estimated to be worth nearly $1,000 at auction.
• The coin looks a lot like an ordinary UK 20p piece, which would be worth about 35 cents.

A man was handed a nondescript coin as part of his change while buying lunch. The coin has now been estimated to be worth nearly $1,000, around 2,800 times its face value.

The ultra-rare 25p coin — or about 35 cents — is set to go under the hammer at a UK auction house on Wednesday.

"There have been a couple of other examples that have gone to auction or sold in the past, but we are talking about a handful," Kimberly Day, the head of coins at RWB Auctions, told Business Insider.

"It's very, very rare," she added.

That's because in standard UK money, there's no such thing as a 25p coin.

According to the auction catalog, the coin is one of a handful of trial coins struck in 1981 "as part of an experiment" while the Royal Mint tried to find a good denomination between the existing 10p and 50p coins.

In the end, they decided against 25p and settled on what is today's common 20p piece, using a very similar design.

It's why the coin is unlikely to have stood out as anything remarkable to most people.

The coin's seller — identified only as a man from Shropshire, in central England — is "lucky" to have an "eagle eye" for detail, Day told BI.

"I bet plenty of people have had these in their change in their wallet and they've probably just passed it on again," she said.

Day added that the seller remembers getting it in his lunch change about five years ago, and thought it looked unusual.

He put it aside "knowing it was something interesting," and pulled it out to be examined a few years later when a similar coin made the news, she said.

The coin is so unusual that there is barely any reference to it online, Day added.

But it's had huge interest from coin collectors, she said, including several who have visited the auction house to check it out in person.

The frenzy could lead to more people identifying the few others that are out there, Day suggested, adding: "I imagine we'll probably see a few more now."

September 25, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misspelled Kimberly Day's first name.