$2 Star Notes
38 print runs · series 2003–2021 · 29 short
The $2 is the denomination where the short run is the rule: 29 of its 38 recorded star runs are short. And the smallest star run in the entire BEP record — 8,000 notes — is a $2. It was printed eleven times over, for eleven different Federal Reserve Banks, all reported in the same month.
What the print record holds for $2 star notes
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing has reported 38 $2 star note runs since October 2002. Twenty-nine of them — 76% — were short runs of 640,000 notes or fewer, the highest proportion of any denomination. The smallest were eleven separate runs of 8,000 notes each, all Series 2003.
- Print runs
- 38
- Short runs
- 29
- Smallest run
- 8,000
- Largest run
- 3,200,000
- Notes printed
- 28,076,000
- Reported
- August 2003 – October 2025
The $2 is barely printed at all: the whole star program since 2002 adds up to 28,076,000 notes, less than a tenth of what the $1 star program produced. When a denomination is printed in small quantities, its replacement runs are small too — which is why the arithmetic that makes $2 star notes scarce is the same arithmetic that makes them common in collections. They are scarce individually and easy to find as a category.
The shortest $2 star runs on record
| Notes printed | Series | Prefix | Federal Reserve Bank | Serial range | Reported |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8,000 | 2003 | A | Boston | 1–8,000 | February 2004 |
| 8,000 | 2003 | B | New York | 1–8,000 | February 2004 |
| 8,000 | 2003 | C | Philadelphia | 1–8,000 | February 2004 |
| 8,000 | 2003 | D | Cleveland | 1–8,000 | February 2004 |
| 8,000 | 2003 | E | Richmond | 1–8,000 | February 2004 |
| 8,000 | 2003 | F | Atlanta | 1–8,000 | February 2004 |
| 8,000 | 2003 | G | Chicago | 1–8,000 | February 2004 |
| 8,000 | 2003 | H | St. Louis | 1–8,000 | February 2004 |
Eleven of those rows are the same size, the same series and the same month. That is not a data error.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| not stated | 1 | 1 | 128,000 | 128,000 |
| 2003 | 13 | 12 | 8,000 | 3,928,000 |
| 2003A | 2 | 2 | 320,000 | 704,000 |
| 2009 | 3 | 3 | 128,000 | 768,000 |
| 2013 | 3 | 1 | 640,000 | 5,040,000 |
| 2017A | 13 | 9 | 32,000 | 10,608,000 |
| 2021 | 3 | 1 | 500,000 | 6,900,000 |
Which Federal Reserve Bank issued them
| District | Federal Reserve Bank | Runs | Short runs | Smallest run |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | San Francisco | 10 | 8 | 8,000 |
| 2 | New York | 6 | 4 | 8,000 |
| 6 | Atlanta | 3 | 3 | 8,000 |
| 7 | Chicago | 3 | 2 | 8,000 |
| 10 | Kansas City | 3 | 2 | 8,000 |
| 9 | Minneapolis | 3 | 2 | 160,000 |
| 3 | Philadelphia | 3 | 2 | 8,000 |
| 11 | Dallas | 2 | 2 | 8,000 |
| 5 | Richmond | 2 | 1 | 8,000 |
| 1 | Boston | 1 | 1 | 8,000 |
| 4 | Cleveland | 1 | 1 | 8,000 |
| 8 | St. Louis | 1 | 1 | 8,000 |
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 $2 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 $2 the record breaks down like this:
- 9 ordinary runs (more than 640,000 notes)
- 8 short runs (640,000 down to 160,001)
- 6 very short runs (160,000 down to 100,001)
- 15 exceptional runs (100,000 or fewer)
The single most common $2 star run size is 8,000 notes, which the BEP has reported 11 times. That figure is also the smallest star run size anywhere in the record, so the two facts sit together rather than cancelling out: it is the ordinary size for a $2 and an extraordinary size against every other denomination. Common here, scarce everywhere else.
February 2004: eleven banks, 8,000 notes each
In one monthly report the BEP recorded a Series 2003 star run of exactly 8,000 notes for Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas and San Francisco — eleven of the twelve districts, every one of them numbered 1 to 8,000. Minneapolis is the one missing.
Those eighty-eight thousand notes are the smallest star runs in the whole record, and there are eighty-eight thousand of them rather than eight thousand. It is the clearest illustration on this site of why run size is not the same thing as rarity of the type: an 8,000-note run is extraordinary, and eleven simultaneous 8,000-note runs make the type itself much less extraordinary than a single one would have been.
One further $2 run in the record carries no series year at all: a 128,000-note San Francisco run reported in November 2015 that the production report left unstated. We leave it unstated too. Filling that blank with a plausible year is precisely the kind of tidy-up that would make every other number on this site less trustworthy.
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 38 are $2. 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 $2 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 · $5 · $10 · $20 · $50 · $100. Each one has its own run table and its own lookup.
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