25 Centavos

El Salvador's coinage underwent a practical overhaul in the late 1980s as chronic inflation eroded the purchasing power of smaller denominations and the cost of producing cupronickel coins began to outpace their face value. The switch to stainless steel was a fiscal correction, not a design decision. Several Latin American central banks made identical moves during the same decade for identical reasons.

The colón had been pegged at 2.50 to the US dollar since 1934, a rate held with unusual stubbornness until the IMF-pressured float of 1990 blew it apart. By the time this series ended in 1999, dollarization was already being seriously discussed — formalized in 2001, which made the entire domestic coinage series obsolete overnight.