Dollar Bill Serial Number Lookup
One number · both checks · 678 print runs on file
There are exactly two things about a serial number that can make a US banknote worth more than its face value. Type yours once and we check both — whether it is a replacement note from a small print run, and whether the digits make a pattern collectors chase.
What is printed on a US serial number
It is not one code, it is four pieces stamped together, and knowing which is which answers most of the questions people arrive with:
- A series letter at the front on modern notes —
M,P,Q— which goes with the series year printed on the face, to the right of the portrait. - A bank letter, always one of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, A through L.
Bis New York,Lis San Francisco. - Eight digits, printed with their leading zeros. This is the part the patterns live in.
- A suffix: either a letter, which means an ordinary note, or a ★, which means a replacement.
$1 and $2 notes often carry a single letter before the digits rather than two. That is normal and it is not a fault — it is why the tool above asks for the denomination rather than guessing it from the prefix.
Check one: is it a star note?
A star at the end means the note is a replacement. During production a sheet gets spoiled, and rather than reprint that exact serial the Bureau of Engraving and Printing runs a separate note with a star to take its place. The BEP publishes how many notes went into each of those replacement runs, month by month.
That number is the whole point. A standard star run is more than 640,000 notes, and there is nothing unusual about being one of those. But a few runs are far smaller — the shortest on record here is 8,000 notes — and a short run is what collectors actually chase, because fewer printed means fewer survive in any condition. The lookup above gives you the run size, the series, the issuing bank and the month it was reported. The full star note lookup adds the original BEP report behind every figure.
One limit, stated before you search rather than after: the records begin in October 2002, because that is when the BEP started publishing this 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 verdict on your note.
Check two: is the serial a pattern?
The eight digits are their own question, and it applies to every note, star or not. Twelve patterns are collected: solid, ladder, radar, repeater, super repeater, double quad, binary, trinary, birthday, low serial, high serial and bookends. Each one has a fixed number of matching serials out of the 99,999,999 possible, so the scarcity can be counted rather than guessed — a solid has nine matches in the entire numbering system, bookends have a million.
Most notes have nothing: the twelve patterns together cover a little over 1.7% of the range, so about 98 in every 100 serials are unremarkable. The fancy serial number checker lists all twelve with the odds behind each and explains what your note hit.
What a serial number cannot tell you
A price. Run sizes and pattern odds are published facts; what a note sells for is not, and the difference is not small. The same 8,000-note star 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. Anyone quoting you a dollar figure from a serial number alone is guessing, and quite a few sites do exactly that.
It also cannot tell you whether a note is genuine, what its series year is worth on its own, or whether an error or misprint is present. Those are separate questions with separate answers, and none of them live in the digits.
Where the data comes from
Print runs: 284 monthly production reports from the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing, parsed into 684 rows and deduplicated to 678 replacement runs, covering October 2002 to May 2026. Works of the US federal government are in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. §105, and each run links back to the report it came from.
Pattern odds: every figure was counted twice by different means — once by testing all 99,999,999 possible serials against the same code the tool runs, and once by deriving it from combinatorics by hand. The two agree, and the check re-runs whenever the tool changes. Full detail in the methodology, including what we refuse to tell you and why.