The 1854 $3 gold issue is a one-year-only design type with the denomination, DOLLARS, in particularly small letters. The mints at Philadelphia, Dahlonega, and New Orleans all struck and issued the $3 denomination in 1854 with the small DOLLARS reverse lettering style. The presses at Charlotte - and later, Carson City - never struck a $3 gold piece of any date, and the freshly opened San Francisco Mint only issued the denomination sporadically beginning in 1855. From 1855 onward until the close of the series in 1889, the word DOLLARS appears in noticeably larger letters. The vast majority of 1854 $3 gold coins offered in the last decade or so have been EF and AU, with occasional forays into Mint State but seldom graded higher than MS-64.

The example to the left was sold by Stack's Bowers Galleries in the March 2018 Baltimore Auction, where it realized $78,000.