TSA Collects Your Loose Change

With hundreds of thousands of travelers throwing wallets into bins every day, some loose change is bound to fall out and get left behind. Over time, that really adds up; in 2020 alone, the Transit Security Administration (TSA) gathered more than $500,000 in loose change, and that’s during a pandemic — in 2019, they picked up more than $900,000. The biggest source of lost change was Harry Reid (formerly McCarran) International Airport near Las Vegas, where passengers left behind $37,611.61.

The TSA has to submit reports to Congress every year on how much they’ve gathered and what they spent it on. They ended 2020 with $1.5 million, including money leftover from previous years, and spent much of it on pandemic mitigation measures like masks, gloves, and face shields.