Nebraska gold and silver money law

Nebraska Revised Statute 77-2704.66 exempts both "currency" and "bullion" from sales and use tax, according to the Nebraska Department of Revenue's own sales tax exemptions guide. The statute defines currency as a coin or currency made of gold, silver, or other metal or paper that is or has been used as legal tender, a definition broad enough to reach a monetized coin in any metal, not only gold and silver. It defines bullion as bars, ingots, or medallions of gold, silver, platinum, palladium, or a combination of these, valued by metal content rather than form. Legislative Bill 1317 of 2024 broadened the bullion definition, effective January 1, 2025, to add coins, notes, leaf, foil, and film to the list of covered forms, closing any gap for bullion coins that might not independently qualify as monetized currency. The Department of Revenue's guide states no documentation is required to claim either exemption and does not describe any purity threshold, dollar minimum, or jewelry or numismatic carve-out. Because the currency and bullion clauses together reach coin, bar, ingot, and several other forms across all four listed metals with no numeric threshold this record could find, Nebraska is classed as a full exemption. This record could not load nebraskalegislature.gov directly, since it refused connections from this research environment, so the statute's own codified text is not independently confirmed here beyond what the Department of Revenue's guide and the enacted bill's legislative history establish.

Gold and silver are not recognized as legal tender in Nebraska as of the verification date above.

The Nebraska Department of Revenue's 2025 Corporation Income Tax Booklet describes an adjustment created by Legislative Bill 1317 of 2024: individuals, corporations, and fiduciaries must subtract from federal adjusted gross income or federal taxable income any net capital gain from the sale or exchange of gold or silver bullion, to the extent the gain is included in federal income, and must add back any net capital loss from the same kind of sale on the same terms. The booklet notes the adjustment does not apply to a taxable distribution of a gain or loss on bullion held in a retirement plan account. Unlike the sales tax exemption, this income tax adjustment is written to reach gold or silver bullion specifically; this record found no Department of Revenue text extending the same subtraction to platinum or palladium.

Nebraska built its bullion tax treatment in two omnibus revenue bills a decade apart, and it has never enacted a legal tender declaration for gold or silver alongside them. Legislative Bill 867 of 2014, one of several tax measures Senator Galen Hadley carried that session, created the original sales and use tax exemption for currency and bullion, passing the unicameral legislature 49 to 0 with an emergency clause and signed by Governor Dave Heineman on April 2, 2014.

Legislative Bill 1317 of 2024 expanded that framework substantially. As with LB867, it was an omnibus vehicle that absorbed pieces of more than a dozen separate bills through amendment. Among its precious metals provisions, it broadened the statutory definition of bullion to explicitly include coins, notes, leaf, foil, and film alongside the original bars, ingots, and medallions, and it created a matching income tax adjustment requiring gold or silver bullion capital gains to be backed out of, and capital losses added back to, a Nebraska taxpayer's income, except for gains or losses realized inside a retirement account. Governor Jim Pillen signed it April 23, 2024, and the Department of Revenue's own guidance dates both the bullion form expansion and the income tax adjustment to January 1, 2025.

The two provisions are not identically scoped. The sales tax exemption's bullion and currency clauses together reach gold, silver, platinum, and palladium in coin, bar, ingot, and several other forms, with no purity threshold or dollar minimum in the Department of Revenue's guidance. The income tax adjustment, by contrast, is written to reach gold or silver bullion specifically; this record found no Department guidance extending the capital gains subtraction to platinum or palladium. Nebraska has not enacted any statute declaring gold or silver coin legal tender.