Last updated: September 2026

What is a banknote watermark?

A watermark is a picture formed in the paper while the sheet is still forming, never printed on afterward. Wire shapes attached to the papermaking mold hold back or gather fiber, leaving the finished sheet thinner or thicker in those places, and that difference in thickness reads as light and shade when you backlight it.

The mechanics have barely changed in seven centuries. The historian Jack Mockford describes the process plainly in his study of Bank of England forgery: producing a watermark "involved sewing a thin wire frame into the paper mould, which when the paper mixture was formed and left to dry would leave a lightly thinned out effect in the finished product" (Jack Mockford, University of Hertfordshire, 2014). Thin the fiber and light passes through more easily, so that area looks bright. Pile the fiber up and it looks dark. A full portrait watermark is simply that trick repeated at dozens of depths across one face.

Because the image lives in the structure of the sheet, it depends entirely on the sheet being right. Currency paper is not wood pulp: the Bureau of Engraving and Printing states that United States currency paper is 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen (Bureau of Engraving and Printing). That rag furnish is long-fibered and strong enough to survive being formed at uneven thickness and then run through an intaglio press. Our guide to banknote paper covers the substrate in detail, and how banknotes are printed follows the sheet through the presses.

When were watermarks invented?

Watermarking began in Fabriano, a papermaking town in the Italian Marche region. The Museo della Carta e della Filigrana records that "towards the end of the 1200's the craftsmen active in Fabriano were in the habit of countersigning their production with watermarks," which makes the watermark older than European printing itself.

The Fabriano papermakers were not thinking about counterfeiting. They were signing their work, the way a silversmith punches a hallmark. The town's archives name individual papermakers as early as the notary Berretta's acts of 1283, and the papermakers' corporation became official in 1326 (Museo della Carta e della Filigrana, Fabriano). Within a few decades Fabriano had become, in the museum's phrase, the cradle of paper handicraft in Europe.

The craft of cutting the image went through three eras. The earliest punches were carved in positive on hardwood slabs of walnut, cherry or box, then hammered against an annealed bronze sheet to transfer the image. From the second half of the 1800s, engravers used a lost-wax technique, cutting a wax sheet against the light so that every ridge and hollow set a different shade. By the early 1900s the punches were made by galvanoplastic deposition, an electrochemical process that produced matched negative and positive copper sheets (Museo della Carta e della Filigrana, watermark technique). Each step bought finer tonal control, which is exactly what a portrait watermark needs.

When did banknotes start carrying watermarks?

Watermarked paper reached bank notes in 1697. Mockford's study records that although the technique itself dates to the 13th century, it "was first applied to Bank Note paper in England by a Berkshire paper maker named Rice Watkins in 1697," only three years after the Bank of England was founded.

The timing was not an accident. The Bank of England had opened in 1694 and its early notes were handwritten receipts for deposits, often for odd sums including shillings and pence; it did not begin issuing partially printed notes for set amounts until 1725 (Bank of England). A handwritten promise to pay was trivially easy to copy, and the paper was the one part of it an ordinary forger could not make. Putting the mark in the sheet moved the hardest problem out of the print shop and into the mill.

Wavy lines matter more than they sound. A straight laid line can be faked with a press or a print; an irregular wave formed in wet fiber cannot, and putting the value in the watermark made it much harder to raise a note from one denomination to another. For the wider story of British note design, see our history of Bank of England notes.

What does the watermark show on each major currency?

Most modern watermarks repeat the note's printed portrait in the blank area beside it, so the two images can be compared against each other. A few use numerals or bar patterns instead, and polymer issues drop the watermark entirely in favor of a transparent window. The table below gives the subject and the design generation it arrived with.

United States subjects and design generations per uscurrency.gov and its $5 denomination page; euro per the European Central Bank; Japanese notes per the Bank of Japan; British and Canadian notes per the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada.

What different kinds of watermark are there?

Three families cover almost every note you will handle. Portrait watermarks build a face out of many thicknesses of fiber. Numeral and letter watermarks reproduce a value or a word in one or two flat tones. Bar and pattern watermarks form simple stripes or geometry, and they are deliberately harder for a scanner to imitate than a soft portrait.

Portrait watermarks

The portrait is the most demanding kind to make and the easiest to judge. It needs many gradations rather than a simple light shape, and the eye is unusually good at spotting a wrong face. The United States repeats the printed portrait, so Franklin's watermark sits in the blank oval to the right of Franklin's engraving on the $100 and the two should agree with each other. The Bank of England Museum makes the same point about engraved portraits generally: "Portraits are a useful security feature for banknotes as the human eye can easily detect changes to an image of a face" (Bank of England Museum).

Numeral and denomination watermarks

The oldest use of a watermark on money was to state the value, so a forger could not turn a low note into a high one. That is what the Bank of England added in 1801, and it is what the current United States $5 does: uscurrency.gov describes a vertical pattern of three numeral 5s to the left of the portrait and a large numeral 5 in the blank space to the right (uscurrency.gov). The $5 is the only current American note whose watermark is not a face.

Bar and pattern watermarks

Japan runs the most interesting variant in circulation. Alongside the portrait watermark, Bank of Japan notes carry what the Bank calls a watermark-bar-pattern: vertical bars embedded in the paper, with the number of bars differing by denomination, so the count itself helps identify the note. On the series first issued in November 2004 that meant three bars on the 10,000 yen note, two on the 5,000 and one on the 1,000. The Bank states plainly why the feature exists, describing the bars as "more difficult to reproduce with personal computers or color copiers than the traditional watermark" (Bank of Japan). The 2024 series kept the bars and added high-definition patterns behind the portrait watermark.

How do you check the watermark on a banknote?

Hold the note up to a light source and look through it, not at it. A genuine watermark appears only in transmitted light, shows a gradual range of tones rather than one flat shape, and reads the same way from the front and the back. Then compare it with the printed design beside it.

1. Use transmitted light. A window or a lamp behind the note is enough. If the image is just as visible when the light is in front of the note, it was printed on the surface.
2. Turn the note over. Because the image is in the sheet, it appears from both sides. uscurrency.gov makes this the explicit test for every American portrait watermark: it is "visible from both sides of the note when held to light."
3. Look for tone, not outline. A real portrait watermark fades in and out. A hard-edged gray patch with no gradation is a printed imitation.
4. Check that it matches the note. The watermark subject should be the correct person or numeral for that denomination and design generation. A Lincoln watermark on a 2008-design $5 is the wrong generation; that design uses numerals.
5. Never stop at one feature. Read the thread, the raised intaglio and the color-shifting ink as well. Our reference on banknote security features covers the full set, and how to spot counterfeit banknotes puts them in order.

Which banknotes have no watermark at all?

Plenty of genuine notes have no watermark. Polymer notes replace it with a transparent window, low denominations sometimes never received one, and notes printed under emergency conditions often skipped it. A missing watermark proves nothing on its own unless that specific note is documented as having one.

Polymer is the big category. All four Bank of England denominations are now printed on polymer, and instead of a watermark they carry a large see-through window with the monarch's portrait printed on it (Bank of England). The Bank issued its first polymer note, the £5 featuring Sir Winston Churchill, on 13 September 2016. Canada's vertical notes work the same way, built from a single piece of polymer with transparent areas rather than watermarked paper. Our comparison of polymer and paper banknotes explains what each substrate can and cannot host.

Two American notes are the other familiar case. The security thread and microprinting introduced on the Series 1990 $100 had reached every denomination except the $1 and the $2 by Series 1993, and neither of those notes has been given a watermark since. The Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar note is the example collectors ask about most often, because it is a genuine 2008 issue with no watermark at all; our Zimbabwe 100 trillion authentication reference lists the features it does carry and how to read them instead.

What does a watermark tell a collector?

For a collector the watermark does three jobs. It helps confirm the note is genuine, it dates the note to a design generation, and it is the first thing lost when paper is washed, pressed or repaired, so it doubles as a condition check that no amount of flattening can restore.

The dating use is underrated. Because central banks change the watermark subject when they redesign a note, the mark ties a piece to a window of years without any reference to the serial number. The American $5 is the cleanest example: a Lincoln watermark places the note in the 2000 to 2008 design, and numeral watermarks place it in the 2008 design or later. The same logic separates a first-series euro note from a Europa series note, since only the Europa series carries the Europa portrait.

The condition use matters more when money is involved. Watermarks are formed by fiber distribution, so a note that has been soaked, bleached or pressed to hide a fold usually shows a flattened, muddied or uneven mark long before anything else gives the treatment away. That is one reason serious material trades certified. If you want the watermark question settled by a third party, browse notes already sealed and graded in our graded banknotes selection, and read the banknote grading guide for what the numeric scale and paper-quality designations actually mean. For the vocabulary used above, see the banknote glossary, and for the faces the watermarks copy, see portraits on banknotes and how to read a serial number.

Planet Banknote is a family-owned dealership in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 2021. Every note is sourced direct from mints, central banks, and authorized distributors, inspected through our Planet Banknote Verified process, and ships with a free Certificate of Authenticity. US orders ship free via USPS Priority, and every order includes a free bonus gift.