Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

A penny saved is a penny earned

Not Benjamin Franklin — an anonymous English proverb Unknown — a traditional English proverb Anonymous · ancestor forms in print from 1633 · the ‘earned’ wording from 1804
Franklin’s real 1737 wording is confirmed against a scanned edition; the “earned” variant is traced to an 1804 printing that already calls it proverbial. Free to reuse

Franklin never wrote “earned.” What he actually printed, in the “Hints for those that would be Rich” column of Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1737, was a different and stronger maxim: “A penny saved is twopence clear.” The “a penny earned” wording is first documented in 1804 — fourteen years after Franklin’s death — and even there it is introduced as “that good old saying,” so its coiner is unknown.

Last verified 14 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“A penny saved is a penny earned” an anonymous English proverb; earliest known printing 1804 (Joseph Huddart, Swansea Harbour, p. 13), where it is already called "that good old saying." Frequently misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, who instead wrote "A penny saved is twopence clear" in Poor Richard's Almanack (1737).

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Benjamin Franklin. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Benjamin Franklin — Printer, scientist, diplomat & Founding Father. Theme: "A penny saved is a penny earned". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "A penny saved is a penny earned". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The earliest documented “earned”

Quote
“A penny saved is a penny earned” — anonymous English proverb
Earliest known printing
Joseph Huddart (the Elder), Swansea Harbour… (1804), p. 13
What Franklin wrote
“A penny saved is twopence clear” — Poor Richard’s Almanack (1737)
Older form in print
“A Penny saved is a Penny got” — The Spectator, No. 2 (2 March 1711)

I have reason to fear, that too many masters of ships forget that good old saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned”. Swansea Harbour report, 1804

This is the earliest documented appearance of the familiar wording, and it is already secondhand: Huddart introduces it as “that good old saying,” not as anything of his own. Franklin had died fourteen years earlier, and his own version of the maxim used neither “earned” nor “a penny” on the second half — he wrote “twopence clear.”

Wiktionary: a penny saved is a penny earned (with the 1804 citation)

The paper trail

  • c. 1633 — the ancestor. George Herbert’s Outlandish Proverbs gives “A penny spar’d is twice got”; Thomas Fuller (c. 1661) has “a penny saved is a penny gained” and Edward Ravenscroft’s Canterbury Guests (1695) “A penny sav’d, is a penny got,” per The Phrase Finder ↗.
  • 1711 — in The Spectator. In Richard Steele’s No. 2 (2 March 1711), the merchant Sir Andrew Freeport “abounds in several frugal Maxims, amongst which the greatest Favourite is, ‘A Penny saved is a Penny got’” — already a quoted maxim, not Steele’s coinage (full text ↗).
  • 1732 — Franklin quotes it. Writing as “Celia Single” in The Pennsylvania Gazette (24 July 1732), Franklin has a husband say “you know a penny sav’d is a penny got, A pin a day is a groat a year, every little makes a muckle” — borrowing, not inventing (Smyth, Writings, vol. 2 ↗).
  • 1737 — Franklin rewrites it. In “Hints for those that would be Rich,” after a passage on ready money versus credit, he prints his own sharper version: “A penny saved is twopence clear. A pin a-day is a groat a-year. Save and have. Every little makes a mickle” (scanned text, under the head “Poor Richard for 1737” ↗).
  • 1804 — “earned” appears. The familiar wording surfaces in Joseph Huddart’s Swansea Harbour report, p. 13, already labelled “that good old saying” (Wiktionary citation ↗).
Public domain

Every documented carrier of this wording is comfortably out of copyright in the United States: the 1804 Huddart report in which it first appears, along with its antecedents — The Spectator No. 2 (1711) and Poor Richard’s Almanack (1737) — were all published long before 1931. The proverb itself is anonymous and traditional, with no identifiable author or estate to hold a claim. Note that the rights status is settled here despite the authorship being unknown, not because of it.

Fact-check

How Franklin got the credit

This is the rare misquote that is wrong three times over: wrong wording, wrong author, and wrong century. Here is what each part of the popular story gets wrong.

Benjamin Franklin Never wrote “earned”

The Franklin Institute lists this among things Franklin never said ↗, giving his actual 1737 wording as “A penny saved is two pence clear.” The scanned 1737 text bears this out: under the running head “Poor Richard for 1737” it reads “A penny saved is twopence clear. A pin a-day is a groat a-year.” ↗

Benjamin Franklin Predates him by a century

The Phrase Finder traces ancestor forms well before Franklin’s birth — George Herbert’s Outlandish Proverbs (c. 1633), “A penny spar’d is twice got”; Thomas Fuller (c. 1661), “a penny saved is a penny gained”; and Edward Ravenscroft’s Canterbury Guests (1695), “A penny sav’d, is a penny got” — and reports “no known record” of Franklin originating it ↗.

Franklin himself He quoted it, openly

In his 24 July 1732 Pennsylvania Gazette letter signed “Celia Single,” Franklin writes “you know a penny sav’d is a penny got” ↗. The words you know mark it as a saying his readers already knew — it had run in Steele’s Spectator No. 2 in 1711 ↗ as a merchant’s “greatest Favourite” maxim.

A c. 1863 cent token Likely vector

The Phrase Finder points to a US cent token of about 1863 carrying Franklin’s image on one side and the proverb on the other ↗ — which it calls “probably the most literal coining of a phrase.” Face and phrase travelled together from there.

The saying belongs to nobody. Its earliest documented appearance in the familiar “earned” form is an 1804 report on Swansea Harbour ↗ — fourteen years after Franklin’s death — and even there the writer calls it “that good old saying,” meaning it was already anonymous and old by then.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Simplicity Work

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wiktionary: a penny saved is a penny earneden.wiktionary.org

Carries the earliest attestation of the exact wording — Joseph Huddart, 1804, p. 13 — and flags the phrase as commonly misattributed to Franklin, who “actually wrote ‘a penny saved is two pence clear.’”
The Phrase Finder: origin of the proverbwww.phrases.org.uk

The fullest chronology of ancestor forms — Herbert (c. 1633), Fuller (c. 1661), Ravenscroft (1695) — and the c. 1863 Franklin cent token that likely welded his name to the saying.
7 Things Benjamin Franklin Never Saidfi.edu

The Franklin Institute lists this quote among lines Franklin never said, and gives his real 1737 wording.
The Spectator, Volume 1 (No. 2, 1711)www.gutenberg.org

Full text of Steele’s No. 2, where Sir Andrew Freeport’s favourite maxim is “A Penny saved is a Penny got” — 21 years before Franklin used it.
Writings of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 2 (Smyth ed.)archive.org

Contains the “Letter from Celia Single,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 24 July 1732, in which Franklin quotes the proverb as already common knowledge.
The Prefaces, Proverbs, and Poems of Benjamin Franklinarchive.org

Scanned text of the “Poor Richard for 1737” material, where the real maxim — “A penny saved is twopence clear” — appears in context.
Wikiquote: Benjamin Franklinen.wikiquote.org

Sourced list of Franklin’s maxims. Notably, “a penny earned” appears nowhere on the page; the 1737 entry reads “A penny saved is two pence clear.”

The man who gets the credit

So what did Franklin actually write?

Benjamin Franklin

1706–1790 · Printer, scientist, diplomat & Founding Father

Franklin ran Poor Richard’s Almanack from 1733 to 1758, and his genius there was editorial rather than original — he openly harvested existing English proverbs and sharpened them. As he admitted in the 1758 preface, the sayings contained “the wisdom of many ages and nations,” not just his own. The thrift maxim is a case in point: he quoted the common version in 1732, then rewrote it in 1737 into something sharper. The line the world remembers is neither of those.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented wording

Joseph Huddart (the Elder), Swansea Harbour. Extracts from the [First] Report of J. H. … Shewing His Plan for the Improvement Thereof, Dated 1794 (1804), 13 — earliest documented appearance of the “earned” wording. Compare Benjamin Franklin, “Hints for those that would be Rich,” Poor Richard’s Almanack (1737): “A penny saved is twopence clear.”

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A penny saved is a penny earned’?” Last verified 14 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-penny-saved-is-a-penny-earned

Copied