Two stamps share the name in this question, and they could not be further apart. Benjamin Franklin 1 cent stamp value means, for almost everyone asking, a small green stamp from the early twentieth century that is worth cents. And then there is its cousin: a blue 1 cent Franklin from 1868 that is the rarest stamp in the United States, with exactly two copies known.
Most Benjamin Franklin 1 cent stamps, especially the green ones printed from 1908 to 1922, are worth cents used and a few dollars mint, because billions were produced. The famous exception is the blue 1868 1 cent Z Grill: two copies are known, and one sold for $4.366 million in June 2024.
This guide covers both, in that order, because the honest answer about the stamp in your drawer comes first.
Benjamin Franklin 1 cent stamp value: the green ones, honestly
Franklin, the first Postmaster General, has been on the 1 cent stamp since the 1850s, but the stamp people actually find is usually from the Washington-Franklin era, the definitive series that ran from 1908 to 1922. The scale of those printings is hard to overstate. The first 1 cent green Franklin of the series alone, Scott 331, has an estimated print run of 5,300,000,000 stamps: five point three billion, of one variety, before counting the dozens of later printings. Across the whole series the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced more than 250 distinct issues.
Stamps printed by the billion for everyday postage were used, discarded, and saved in shoeboxes in enormous numbers, so survival is the norm, not the exception. Per the identification guides, common green 1 cent Franklins list for around 35 cents to a few dollars used at dealer retail, and mint copies of the commonest types start around $11 at dealer retail. Sentimental value: real. Retirement value: no. The same honest arithmetic applies just as firmly to the green Franklin’s neighbour in the series, the 2 cent Washington, and to the later 4 cent Lincoln that took over everyday postage duty in the 1950s.
Which 1 cent Franklin do you have?
You can narrow a green Franklin a long way with your eyes before any catalogue enters the picture. The quick sorting questions, drawn from the Storm the Castle identification guide:
- Is “ONE CENT” curved? Curved lettering means the 1898 design, the only one with it; a used copy lists around 35 cents at dealer retail.
- Is Franklin facing you head-on? The ornate full-face design is the 1902 series. The ordinary perforated versions are common; the coil versions of that design are genuine rarities, one of them a six-figure stamp per the guide’s estimates, but coils are precisely where expert certificates are mandatory, because fakes made from trimmed sheet stamps are everywhere.
- Any overprint reading “Kans.” or “Nebr.”? Those 1929 overprints are worth about a dollar used, per the same guide.
- Profile portrait, straight text? That is the 1908 to 1922 workhorse family, sorted by perforation gauge, watermark, and printing method. Nearly every combination is common; a handful of rotary-press and odd-paper varieties (the 1909 bluish papers among them, at roughly $50 to $100 used per the guide) reward a specialist look.
The pattern to absorb: value in this family lives in technical varieties you identify by measuring, not in age or appearance. A hundred-year-old green Franklin in beautiful condition is usually still a 35 cent stamp.
The million-dollar cousin: the 1868 Z Grill
Now the cousin. In the 1860s the Post Office worried about people washing cancellations off stamps and reusing them, so stamps were embossed with a grill, a pattern of tiny indentations that broke the paper fibres and let cancelling ink soak in permanently. Grill patterns varied as the equipment evolved, and collectors catalogue them by letter. The “Z” grill, distinguished by its horizontal ridges, was used briefly in 1868, and on the 1 cent blue Franklin of that year it produced the rarest of all United States stamps.
Exactly two 1 cent Z Grills are known, both used. One has sat in institutional hands since 1925, when collector Benjamin Miller donated his collection to the New York Public Library; that copy is on long-term loan to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. The other, which surfaced publicly in 1957, is the only one a collector can own, and its price history tells the story of modern philately. Mystic Stamp Company bought it at auction in 1998 for $935,000, then a record for a United States stamp. In November 2005, Mystic’s president Don Sundman traded it to investor Bill Gross for the unique plate block of four Inverted Jenny stamps, a swap in which each side was valued at roughly $3 million. And in June 2024, when Gross’s collection was sold at auction, the Z Grill brought $4.366 million, the most ever paid for a United States stamp.
Could the drawer stamp be a Z Grill? No, and here is why
This is the part value articles usually fudge, so let us not. The Z Grill is blue, not green; it is an 1868 printing, decades older than the common Franklins; and both known copies are documented, photographed, and accounted for. A third discovery is not strictly impossible, which is why the legend endures, but no credible new example has surfaced since 1957. The honest default for any 1 cent Franklin, even a genuinely old blue one, is a common variety, and any grilled 19th-century stamp worth discussing needs an expert certificate before anyone will discuss it. The Z Grill’s siblings live with the other legends in our tour of the rarest stamps in the world.
The two-minute answer for your stamp
Check the colour, the lettering, and the portrait, and you will usually land in the common tiers within a minute. Faster still: photograph the stamp and let Stampo identify the exact issue, catalogue family, and an honest condition-tiered value range on the spot. If a measurement genuinely points at one of the scarce varieties, the next step is an expert opinion, not an eBay listing. For the wider picture on American issues, our United States stamp values guide covers the field from the classics to the moderns.