$5 Star Notes
68 print runs · series 1999–2021 · 40 short
The $5 is the quiet one. Sixty-eight star runs since October 2002, and only one of them falls into the band we call exceptional. Its smallest run on record is 64,000 notes — eight times bigger than the smallest $2 run.
What the print record holds for $5 star notes
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing has reported 68 $5 star note runs since October 2002, across nine series and all twelve Federal Reserve Banks. Forty were short runs of 640,000 notes or fewer. The smallest was 64,000 notes: Series 2013, Atlanta, reported in January 2018.
- Print runs
- 68
- Short runs
- 40
- Smallest run
- 64,000
- Largest run
- 4,352,000
- Notes printed
- 99,195,000
- Reported
- January 2003 – July 2025
What makes the $5 different is not how many short runs it has — at 59% it is around the middle — but how shallow they are. On the $2 and the $10 the record bottoms out in the thousands. On the $5 it stops at 64,000, and the next smallest is nearly twice that. If you are hunting for a spectacular run size, the $5 is the wrong denomination to hunt in.
The shortest $5 star runs on record
| Notes printed | Series | Prefix | Federal Reserve Bank | Serial range | Reported |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 64,000 | 2013 | MF | Atlanta | 9,600,001–9,664,000 | January 2018 |
| 125,000 | 2017A | PB | New York | 1–125,000 | July 2022 |
| 250,000 | 2017A | PG | Chicago | 3,200,001–3,450,000 | July 2019 |
| 320,000 | 2003 | DG | Chicago | 3,200,001–3,520,000 | May 2005 |
| 320,000 | 2003 | DL | San Francisco | 3,200,001–3,520,000 | January 2006 |
| 320,000 | 2009 | JA | Boston | 1–320,000 | March 2013 |
| 320,000 | 2013 | MK | Dallas | 1–320,000 | February 2014 |
| 320,000 | 2013 | MK | Dallas | 3,200,001–3,520,000 | May 2014 |
The gap between the first row and the second is the story of this denomination: one outlier, and then a floor.
No dollar figure here, and that is deliberate. Run size tells you how many notes exist. What a note is worth depends on its condition, and two notes from the same run can be an order of magnitude apart. Anyone who quotes you a price from a serial number alone is guessing. Use these numbers to know what you have, then have it graded before you believe a figure.
Series by series
| Series | Runs | Short runs | Smallest run | Notes printed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | 3 | 1 | 640,000 | 7,040,000 |
| 2001 | 2 | 0 | 1,920,000 | 5,120,000 |
| 2003 | 6 | 3 | 320,000 | 8,960,000 |
| 2003A | 3 | 2 | 640,000 | 5,632,000 |
| 2006 | 12 | 9 | 640,000 | 13,184,000 |
| 2009 | 3 | 1 | 320,000 | 4,480,000 |
| 2013 | 16 | 10 | 64,000 | 22,464,000 |
| 2017A | 12 | 8 | 125,000 | 14,535,000 |
| 2021 | 11 | 6 | 320,000 | 17,780,000 |
Which Federal Reserve Bank issued them
| District | Federal Reserve Bank | Runs | Short runs | Smallest run |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | Atlanta | 17 | 8 | 64,000 |
| 7 | Chicago | 13 | 10 | 250,000 |
| 12 | San Francisco | 8 | 3 | 320,000 |
| 1 | Boston | 7 | 3 | 320,000 |
| 11 | Dallas | 6 | 4 | 320,000 |
| 2 | New York | 6 | 4 | 125,000 |
| 4 | Cleveland | 3 | 3 | 320,000 |
| 5 | Richmond | 3 | 2 | 640,000 |
| 8 | St. Louis | 2 | 2 | 320,000 |
| 10 | Kansas City | 1 | 0 | 3,200,000 |
| 9 | Minneapolis | 1 | 0 | 3,200,000 |
| 3 | Philadelphia | 1 | 1 | 640,000 |
The district letter in your serial number is the bank that issued the note, not the city it was printed in. All twelve districts appear in the $5 star record.
How to read a run size
A star run of more than 640,000 notes is ordinary. At 640,000 or fewer the note starts to be scarce, and the further below, the scarcer. On the $5 the record breaks down like this:
- 28 ordinary runs (more than 640,000 notes)
- 38 short runs (640,000 down to 160,001)
- 1 very short runs (160,000 down to 100,001)
- 1 exceptional runs (100,000 or fewer)
The single most common $5 star run size is 3,200,000 notes, which the BEP has reported 21 times. If your run comes back at that figure, you have a perfectly normal star note — which is what most star notes are.
Reading a two-letter $5 prefix
From Series 2003 onward the $5 serial prefix is two letters, and they mean different things. The first is the series letter; the second is the Federal Reserve Bank. In MF 01234567★ the F is Atlanta, the sixth district. The M belongs to the series, not to the bank.
That is worth knowing before you compare your note against a list you found elsewhere: a table that treats the first letter as the bank will send you to the wrong district on every modern $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100. The lookup on this page reads both letters, and it reads them the way the production report writes them — including the cases where the BEP itself spells the same prefix two different ways.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page is counted from the Monthly Production Reports of the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing — 284 reports covering October 2002 to May 2026, parsed into 684 rows and deduplicated to 678 star note runs, of which 68 are $5. Works of the US federal government carry no copyright under 17 U.S.C. §105. Nothing here comes from a dealer’s price list. The parsing, the checks and the known gaps are written up in the methodology.
Records start in October 2002. A $5 star note older than that cannot be looked up here — that is a gap in the public record, not a fault in your note.
Other denominations: $1 · $2 · $10 · $20 · $50 · $100. Each one has its own run table and its own lookup.
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