The Statue of Liberty holds about 62,000 pounds of copper — roughly 31 tons. That copper forms the entire outer skin of the monument, from the sandals to the flame, draped over an iron framework designed by Gustave Eiffel. Despite the enormous surface area, the skin is astonishingly thin: about 3/32 of an inch, or 2.4 millimeters, close to the thickness of two stacked pennies.
That combination — a great deal of copper spread very thin — is the whole engineering trick. Copper is dense, so a solid figure of this size would have been impossibly heavy. Hammered thin and shaped by hand, the same metal becomes a skin light enough to raise 151 feet into the air and durable enough to survive more than a century of salt air.
What is that copper worth?
This is the question most people are really asking, so here is the straight answer. At recent copper prices of roughly four dollars per pound, the raw metal in the Statue would be worth on the order of $250,000 as scrap. That figure moves with the commodity market and is, frankly, the least interesting number on this page.
Because nobody would ever value this copper by the pound. The copper in the Statue of Liberty is not a commodity. It is a specific, finite, historically documented material — hammered in Paris in the early 1880s, shipped to New York in 214 crates, assembled on Bedloe's Island, and dedicated in 1886. Its worth is measured the way any artifact is measured: by what it is, where it has been, and how little of it exists.
The copper that left the Statue
Here is the part almost no one searching this question knows. Not all of the original 1886 copper is still on the Statue. During the 1984–1986 federal restoration, workers removed original copper from the monument. That copper was authenticated and preserved rather than melted down, and it now rests in custodial stewardship at Belcourt of Newport, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit museum.
So the true answer to "how much is the Statue's copper worth" splits in two. The 31 tons on the monument are, in a sense, priceless — they are the Statue, and the Statue is not for sale. But a small, finite quantity of authenticated 1886 copper, removed during the restoration, has been struck into commemorative coins. That copper carries something scrap copper never can: a documented chain of custody back to the workshops of Paris.
Weighed by the pound, the Statue's copper is worth a few hundred thousand dollars. Weighed by its history, a single coin of it is worth holding onto.
Each Real Liberty Copper coin is struck from authenticated 1886 Statue of Liberty copper and arrives with complete provenance documentation. See how the copper was preserved, read the provenance record, or view the coin and its certificate of title.