Value Of 1982-1983 Coins?

No official Mint Sets were issued in 1982 and 1983. In other years, the mint sets provide a natural reservoir of generally better quality unc coins but that does not exist for 82-83. Sure, some bags and rolls were saved at the time but not enough to offset the absence of 1-2 million mint sets. This shortage of unc coins has caused values to dramatically increase while average circulated examples are quite common and only worth face value.

At the risk of nit picking there is no certainty that all these exist in bags. The '83-P dime definitely exists in bags and there's a rumor that an entire pallet of '82-D quarters survived. Numismatic News reported that an individual had all four of the quarters in one bag quantity. It's almost certain all the half dollars existed in bag quantities. I wouldn't bet on the rest. Since they aren't tooscarce it is likely they were in bags but these were all most elusive. I'm not counting the two major wholesalers because their supplies were apparently exhausted by the time the FED's supply was gone.

There were a lot of rolls of these saved. People knew there wouldn't be mint sets and did set aside more rolls but this amounted to very few coins in those days because people simply didn't collect or save clad. There were probably as few as about 80,000 '82-P quarters saved and most of these have been taken from their rolls over the years.

The reason the prices are as low as they are is that there is very little demand.

You'd have to look fairly hard to find one in that poor of condition. Most of them are still F and low grade VF. These have a fairly good value in nice AU and AU but Almost no premium in XF. Below that they are quite common since there are still nearly 400 million in circulation.

The '83 in AU has traded hands at as much as $20 but this is a really nice one. The '82-P might bring 5 or 10 dollars in really nice AU with the right buyer.