
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing receives around 25,000 mutilated currency redemption claims annually.Calculated as the ratio of quarterly nominal GDP to the quarterly average of M2 money stock. They then validate its authenticity and issue a Treasury check in return. Now Thats Interesting According to Economics Stack Exchange, a site for those who study, teach and research economic issues: The U.S.īureau of Engraving and Printing creates all of the nations bills, while the U.S.īanks and individuals will hand over mutilated bills and coins to these agencies. However, if you find a replacement note with a particularly interesting serial number like 00000001 or 999999999 or a large number of consecutively numbered replacement notes that you keep together as a lot, you may have a collectors item on your hands. This allows for 99,999,999 possible replacement notes for any given bank, series and denomination. The replacement notes have a sequence of their own, using the star as their final letter. With replacements notes, a set of serial numbers can still have the proper number of bills even if some of the original bills had to be pulled. When a printing error occurs during a normal press run and renders a set of bills unusable, replacement notes are used instead. The final letter is used to raise the number of possible bills beyond 99,999,999.Īdvertisement This star represents what is known as a replacement note. Using these digits alone, there would be a possible 99,999,999 bills issued per bank.


The eight numerical digits that follow represent a unique ID number. The second letter (or first, if youre looking at an old-style bill) represents the district of the Federal Reserve Bank that your bill was issued from.Īs there are 12 Federal Reserve Banks, this letter can range from A to L, with A representing Boston and L representing San Francisco. You can also find the series of the bill printed directly to the bottom-right of the portrait. This begins with A, and moves through the alphabet each time a new series is needed (for example, each time there is a new secretary of the treasury, the bill design changes because the secretarys signature is on all currency). The series indicates the year in which the design of the bill was approved for production. The serial number consists of the following: The first letter, only found on the new-style bills, represents the series of the bill. Those bills (and all produced since then) have an 11-digit serial. Ten-digit serial numbers were on all bills until the new style came out in 1996.

