So how do you get your hands on one? It helps if you have friends in high and very secure places.

As such, there can be more than one bill in any denomination with the same serial number in a given year.)

(Before the serial number you'll see one or two letters these indicate which Federal Reserve bank issued it. The low number ones are among the most valuable, with new $100 bills with 00000001 expected to sell for as much as $15,000. Then there are random ones: 31415927 (pi) or 07041776 (read that as ). And as the Boston Globe explains, currency collectors will pay big if the numbers are 'fancy.' That's the collectors' term, not the Globe's, for serial numbers that fall in a number of categories: there are 'low' (00000001 through 00000100), 'ladders' (43210987), 'radar' (43788734), 'solids' (33333333), and 'repeaters' (82118211). But it is including, as always, an eight-digit serial number. No, the government isn't slipping in an extra zero. We are a couple of weeks away from getting our newly designed $100 bills, and when they arrive on October 8, some will actually be worth $1,000. The last letter still can be anything but O or Z, and is still occasionally replaced by a star, with the same meaning as before.Watch Video: New $100 bill touts added security features On these notes, the first letter corresponds to the series of the note and the second letter of each serial number now represents the issuing FRB and ranges from A through L. A 'star' note has its own special serial number followed by a star in place of a suffix letter.įederal Reserve notes, beginning with Series 1996, have two letters rather than one at the beginning of the serial number. Reusing an exact serial number to replace an imperfect note is costly and time consuming. A 'star' sheet is used to replace the imperfect sheet. When an imperfect sheet is detected during the manufacturing process after the serial number has been overprinted, it must be replaced with a new sheet. On some notes, a star appears in place of the last letter. The letter O is not used because of its similarity to the digit 0, and the letter Z is not used because it is reserved for test printings. At the time of a series change, the suffix letter returns to the letter A and repeats the cycle. The last letter advances through the alphabet when all eight character serial numbers have been printed for a specific Federal Reserve Bank within the same series. The first letter of such a serial number identifies the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) which issued the note since there are 12 FRBs, this letter is always between A and L. Up through Series 1995, all Federal Reserve notes had serial numbers consisting of one letter, eight digits, and one letter, such as A12345678B now only the $1 and $2 notes still use this form. Each note of the same denomination has its own serial number.

2009 dollar bill serial number lookup