Star Note Lookup

678 print runs · October 2002 onward

A star at the end of a serial number means the note is a replacement — printed to stand in for one that was spoiled during production. Some replacement runs are enormous. A few are tiny, and that is where the money is.

Star note lookup

Star Note Serial Number Lookup

Type the serial number and find out how many notes were printed in that run — straight from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s own monthly reports.

Loading the run data…

Serial number Spaces or no spaces, star or no star, upper or lower case — all fine. Example: MB 12345678 ★ or l12800001*

Denomination The serial prefix alone does not say which bill it is — the same letters exist on several.

My star notes

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This is a print run size, not a price. We can tell you how many notes the BEP printed in your note’s run because they published the figure. What a note sells for depends on its condition, on demand for that district and series, and on what a buyer will pay today — none of which is in this data, and none of which we will pretend to know. Collectors treat runs of 640,000 notes or fewer as “short runs”: that threshold is collector convention, not an official BEP category.

Run figures come from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing monthly production reports. Each result links to the exact PDF the figure was read from, so you can check it yourself.

What the tool tells you

Type the serial number and denomination and it finds the print run your note belongs to: how many notes were printed in that run, which Federal Reserve Bank issued them, the series year, the serial range, and when the run was reported. Every one of those figures comes straight from the monthly production reports of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

A standard star run is more than 640,000 notes. At 640,000 or fewer it counts as a short run, and short runs are what collectors actually chase — the shortest on record here is 8,000 notes.

What it deliberately does not tell you

We do not quote a dollar value, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does from a serial number alone. Two notes from the same 8,000-note run can be worth an order of magnitude apart depending on condition: a crisp uncirculated note and one that has spent fifteen years folded in a wallet are not the same object. Run size tells you how scarce the note is. Grade tells you what it is worth. We can give you the first with certainty; nobody can give you the second from eight digits and a star.

How to read your serial number

A star note ends with ★ (often written as *). If yours ends in a letter, it is a regular note and there is no print run to look up.
The letter before the digits is the series prefix; it goes with the series year printed on the face.
Records here begin in October 2002, because that is when the BEP began publishing the monthly production data in a usable form. A star note older than that will not be found — that is a gap in the public record, not a fault in your note.

Star notes by denomination

Every denomination has its own print record, and they are not alike. The $2 is the one where the short run is the rule rather than the exception; the $100 has more runs than anything else and the widest spread between them; the $5 has almost no dramatic ones at all. Each page below carries that denomination’s full run table — series by series and bank by bank — and opens this lookup already narrowed to it.

$1 star notes — 178 runs, 83 of them short
$2 star notes — 38 runs, 29 short, and the smallest run in the entire record
$5 star notes — 68 runs, and only one of them exceptional
$10 star notes — 46 runs, including one of 9,600 notes
$20 star notes — 130 runs, 67 of them short, the smallest 128,000
$50 star notes — 34 runs, the fewest of any denomination, the smallest 64,000
$100 star notes — 184 runs, more than any other denomination

Where the data comes from

284 monthly production reports from the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing, parsed into 684 rows and deduplicated to the 678 print runs published here. Works of the US federal government are in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. §105. The dataset is checked run by run against its source after every rebuild — see the methodology.

The other thing a serial number can be

The star and the digits are two separate questions. A serial can also make a fancy serial number — a radar, a repeater, a solid, a ladder — and that applies whether or not the note is a replacement. The combination collectors actually chase is both at once: a short run and a pattern. If you are not sure which of the two you are holding, the serial number lookup runs both checks on the same number.

Found something interesting? The tool can keep a list of your notes in your own browser. We never see it.