On 22 January 2018 the public procurement contract for the minting and exploitation rights of coins was awarded to the Royal Dutch Mint. From now on, they will produce the circulation coins and commemorative coins for Belgium, by order and under the supervision of the Royal Belgian Mint. The coins will still be designed by Luc Luycks of the Royal Belgian Mint. The Belgian King remains the legal issuer of the coins.

You can contact the Royal Dutch Mint in Belgium at klantendienst@herdenkingsmunten.be or at www.herdenkingsmunten.be, where you can find more information about the new commemorative coins on offer. You can also order them online.

The Royal Belgian Mint has started to sell its remaining stock of commercial products through Finshop. Coins will regularly be on offer at the following link.

In the last few years it has been impossible to get commemorative coins at bank counters or at the National Bank of Belgium. New €2 commemorative coin rolls are no longer produced. For some time now they have only been on offer in coincards for collectors.

You can buy coin rolls at your bank or at the counters of the National Bank of Belgium (avenue de Berlaimont 3, 1000 Brussels). However, we cannot guarantee that you will receive coin rolls of this year, since rolls are also issued with coins that have come back from the market and have been repacked for circulation. As a result, the rolls may not only contain Belgian coins, but also foreign coins, and the year on the coins will be different.

Our country has stopped putting new €2 coins into circulation because we still have a large stock of existing €2 coins. That is why new commemorative coins are, for the time being, only offered as collector’s items in coincards, although they are legal tender in the entire euro area. Their design has been approved at a European level and adequate royal decrees have been issued as a legal basis for these coins.

The special packaging and limited issuing have turned these coins into collector’s items for which a surcharge is applied. However, Belgium is not the only country to supply this kind of products in coincards or to sell €2 coins at a price above their face value. Moreover, more and more countries are mulling over the idea of stopping the production of new €2 commemorative coins for circulation purposes (but not for collection purposes) in order to meet the request of European authorities not to produce any new coins and to eliminate the existing stock surpluses first.

Since the beginning of this year, Belgian commemorative coins have been commercialized by the Royal Dutch Mint, which was awarded the public procurement contract for coin mintage and exploitation rights. So from now on they will produce the circulation coins and commemorative coins for Belgium, by order and under the supervision of the Royal Belgian Mint. They will also sell the latter type of coins. Since the commercialization is entirely in the hands of the Royal Dutch Mint, they are free to set the selling price. The Royal Belgian Mint has no impact on the price setting. However, the coins are still designed by Luc Luycks of the Royal Belgian Mint.

The Royal Dutch Mint has chosen to present itself on the Belgian market under the name ‘herdenkingsmunten.be’ and can be contacted at www.herdenkingsmunten.be or at klantendienst@herdenkingsmunten.be

In the past, Belgium designed and brought to market a large number of €2 commemorative coins. These issuances mostly involved a combination of circulation coins and higher-quality collectors' coins. In recent years however, we as a country have been faced with a large stock of €2 coins in the Public Treasury. Therefore, it would be difficult to reconcile the production and distribution of new commemorative coins with the fact that there still is a huge existing stock of coins. This would go against the principle of efficiency held in high regard throughout the euro area.

The issuance of €2 commemorative coins is not an obligation. Every country is free to issue two such coins per year, after going through an acceptance process.

Our country has nevertheless decided to issue new €2 coins, but for the time being only as a collector’s item in a coincard. This means that the coins are not put into circulation, although they are €2 coins that are recognized as legal tender in the entire euro area. Their design has been approved at a European level and adequate royal decrees have been issued as a legal basis for these coins.

The Royal Mint of Belgium receives on a regular basis remarks of coin collectors or other members of the public that they come across 2 euro coins in official coin rolls whereas these coins were not produced in official mint rolls by the Royal Mint of Belgium. Often these mint rolls are put up for sale at prices far above the nominal value of the coins.

In the  following (PDF, 1.25 MB) table we present all the 2 euro coins issued by the Royal Mint of Belgium that were not packed in official mint rolls.

The Royal Mint of Belgium emphasizes that official Mint rolls containing 2 euro coins that are listed in the table were not produced in the work places of the Royal Mint of Belgium. Therefore, the KMB cannot confirm that these coin rolls contain 25 similar commemorative coins.