Comparative Data

Every Currency Redenomination Since 1923: The Complete Table

Countries have been striking zeros off their money for more than a century, and the ratios run from a modest ten to one all the way to a number with twenty-nine zeros in it. This page gathers the documented redenominations since the Rentenmark of 1923 into one sourced table: country, date, ratio, old unit, new unit and where the figure comes from. Every row leaves banknotes behind, which is why collectors read this list as a map.

62 documented reforms Largest ratio: 4 × 10²⁹ : 1 Smallest: 5 : 1 Most recent: Syria, 2026

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Last updated: September 2026

What is a currency redenomination?

A redenomination is the replacement of a currency's existing units with new ones at a fixed conversion ratio, usually a power of ten. Prices, wages, contracts and bank balances all move by the same factor on the same day, so nothing changes in real terms. Only the number of digits changes.

The plumbing is always the same. A law or decree sets the ratio and the effective date. Old and new notes usually circulate together for a transition period. Old notes are then withdrawn, counted and destroyed, and the old unit stops being legal tender on a stated date. Syria's Decree No. 293 of 2025 is a textbook example: it fixed 100 old pounds to one new pound, required every public and private body to display prices in both currencies during the transition, and banned any commission or fee on the exchange (SANA, December 31, 2025).

Three things a redenomination is not. It is not a devaluation, because the exchange value of the money against other currencies is unaffected by the arithmetic. It is not a cure for inflation: the head of Iran's parliamentary economic committee said as much when the Iranian measure passed in October 2025, calling it an unavoidable adjustment rather than a fix. And it is not necessarily a sign of collapse. Turkey, Poland, Romania, Mexico, Ghana and Belarus all cut zeros while keeping their currency's name and identity intact.

How is redenomination different from demonetization?

Redenomination is one of four ways a currency gets withdrawn. The others are currency reform, in which a discredited unit is replaced by a new one after a collapse; replacement, in which a successor currency absorbs a predecessor, as the euro did; and denomination withdrawal, in which single face values are pulled while the rest of the currency continues.

The distinction matters for what survives. A redenomination in a functioning economy gives people months to swap notes at a bank, so most of the old paper comes back and is pulped. A currency reform after a hyperinflation often finds that people stopped using the notes long before the law caught up, so bricks of high denominations are simply abandoned. That is why the surviving population of a 2005 Turkish lira note and a 2008 Zimbabwean trillion note look nothing alike, even though both were withdrawn by decree. Our explainer on what demonetization is sets out all four mechanisms with examples.

Every currency redenomination since 1923

The table below lists 62 documented redenominations from 1923 to 2026, ranked by ratio. The largest, Hungary's forint reform of August 1, 1946, converted at 4 × 10²⁹ pengő to one forint. The smallest on the list, Madagascar's move from the franc to the ariary, converted at five to one. Every row names its source.

Where a row cites ISO 4217, the entry is drawn from ISO 4217 List Three, currencies and funds withdrawn, published by SIX Group as the ISO 4217 Maintenance Agency, edition dated January 1, 2026. That list records the currency code that was retired and the month it left the standard, which is generally a few months after the reform itself took effect. Effective dates are given to the precision the sources support: a full date where a decree or central-bank record fixes one, otherwise the month or year. Rows are ranked by ratio, not by date.

Which redenomination had the largest ratio?

Hungary, on August 1, 1946, at 4 × 10²⁹ pengő to one forint. That is four hundred octillion to one, twenty-nine zeros retired in a single step, and no other conversion in the documented record comes within twenty orders of magnitude of it.

The figure is the one used by Bomberger and Makinen in their 1983 study of the Hungarian stabilization, and it reflects a currency that had stopped functioning entirely by mid-1946. Hungary had been running two units side by side: the pengő and the adópengő, an inflation-indexed tax unit. Both were withdrawn on July 31, 1946 and the forint arrived the next day, with the adópengő converting at a comparatively gentle 200,000,000 to one. The difference between those two ratios, twenty-one orders of magnitude, is the whole story of what happened to the pengő in seven months. The full account is on our pengő to forint 1946 page, and the banknote that ended the series is covered in the 100 quintillion pengő.

Below Hungary, the record thins out quickly. Germany's Rentenmark reform of November 15, 1923 and Zimbabwe's third redenomination on February 2, 2009 both converted at 10¹² to one, a trillion to one. Greece converted at 50 billion old drachmai to one new drachma in November 1944 according to the Bank of Greece. Zimbabwe's August 2008 reform took ten zeros. Yugoslavia's January 1, 1994 reform took nine. Everything else on the list is a million to one or smaller.

Which countries redenominated more than once?

Brazil leads on count, with four redenominations between 1986 and 1994. Zimbabwe leads on cumulative zeros removed, with twenty-five across three reforms in three years. Venezuela removed fourteen zeros in three reforms between 2008 and 2021. Argentina removed thirteen between 1970 and 1992.

Serial redenomination is the tell that the reform was arithmetic rather than stabilization. When the underlying inflation keeps running, the zeros come back, and the country has to do it again. Zimbabwe is the clearest case: three zeros in August 2006, ten more in August 2008, twelve more in February 2009, a cumulative factor of 10²⁵, and then the dollar was abandoned altogether in April 2009. The notes from that sequence are documented on our Zimbabwe hyperinflation page and compared denomination by denomination in the Trillion Series compared.

The pattern holds in reverse too. Turkey cut six zeros once, in 2005, and has not needed to do it again. Poland cut four in 1995 and stopped. Mexico cut three in 1993 and stopped. A single clean redenomination that follows a stabilization tends to hold; a redenomination that arrives while inflation is still running does not. The best-documented example of the first kind is Germany in 1948, where the Deutsche Mark replaced the Reichsmark at ten to one for settled balances, a reform we cover in detail on our 1948 currency reform page.

Which redenominations are happening now?

Four currency changes have been live in the last two years. Syria completed a 100 to one exchange between January and July 2026. Iran enacted a 10,000 to one law in late 2025 but has not yet issued a note in the new unit. Bulgaria retired the lev for the euro on January 1, 2026, and Zimbabwe replaced its dollar again in 2024.

Syria is the completed case. Decree No. 293 of 2025 removed two zeros with effect from January 1, 2026, and the Central Bank of Syria issued six new notes dated 2025 in denominations of 10, 25, 50, 100, 200 and 500 pounds. The exchange window opened on January 1 with 90 days of dual circulation, was extended three times, and closed on July 31, 2026. Our Syria 2026 redenomination page sets the two series against each other note by note.

Iran is the announced case, and the distinction matters. Parliament passed a measure on October 5, 2025 defining one new rial as equal to 10,000 current rials and adding a subunit called the qiran, and the Guardian Council approved it on November 8, 2025 (Mehr News Agency). The law allows up to three years of parallel circulation and gives the central bank two years to set procedures (Iran International). No banknote denominated in the new unit has been reported. The most recent Iranian issue, the 10,000,000 rial Iran Cheque of March 3, 2026, is still in old rials. Because it is announced rather than in circulation, Iran is not in the ranked table above. The full picture is on our Iran rial to toman redenomination page.

Bulgaria is the third, and it is a different kind of change. The lev was not rescaled; it was retired in favor of the euro from January 1, 2026, which ISO 4217 List Three records as the withdrawal of the BGN code that month. Currency-union changeovers convert between two different currencies at a fixed statutory rate rather than striking zeros off one, so they sit outside the ranked table above.

Zimbabwe is a fourth case worth flagging. ISO 4217 List Three records the ZWL code as withdrawn in September 2024, which marks the end of the fourth Zimbabwe dollar and the arrival of its successor. Because that changeover was not a clean power-of-ten conversion either, it is not ranked in the table above. It does mean Zimbabwe has changed its currency more often in the past twenty years than any other country on this page.

Why do collectors chase the last notes before a redenomination?

Because a redenomination fixes the surviving population of the old series on a known date. The high denominations printed in the final months are the shortest-lived notes a central bank ever issues, and they often come out of the exchange barely handled, which is why so many hyperinflation notes survive in uncirculated grade.

Three things make the last pre-reform issue interesting. First, it is dateable to the month. Syria's outgoing 5,000 pound note was issued on January 24, 2021 and was among the first three denominations pulled when the exchange opened on January 1, 2026: a five-year working life, start to finish. Second, the print run is usually small, because the reform was already being planned when the note was ordered. Third, abrupt withdrawal preserves condition. Notes that are counted in at a bank counter and pulped leave behind whatever stayed outside the banking system, and what stayed outside was generally not spent.

The counter-case is just as instructive. Where a redenomination is orderly and the economy is working, almost everything comes back. That is why 2005 Turkish lira notes and 1995 Polish złoty notes are collected as tidy complete series rather than as scarcities, while Zimbabwe's 2008 trillion family is a global collecting category in its own right. Our guide to what determines banknote value works through the same logic in general terms, and the grading guide explains the condition ladder that decides most of the price.

If you want to start with the reforms that left the most dramatic paper behind, the curated hyperinflation sets put several of these currencies in one place, and every hyperinflation ranked puts the crises themselves in severity order. For the individual museums, see Germany, Hungary, Greece, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Poland, Austria, Armenia, Nicaragua and Republika Srpska.

How this table is sourced

Every row names its source, and the sources fall into four kinds: a national decree or law, a numismatic or central-bank record, the ISO 4217 standard's register of withdrawn currency codes, and named studies and reference pages. The Source column says which applies to each row, because they do not all carry the same weight.

The backbone of the modern half of the table is ISO 4217 List Three, the official register of currencies and funds withdrawn from the international standard, published by SIX Group in its role as ISO 4217 Maintenance Agency. Each entry records the country, the currency name, its three-letter code and the month the code was retired. That gives an unambiguous, dated confirmation that one currency was replaced by another, independent of any news report. It does not, on its own, give the conversion ratio, so ratios are taken from the reform's own documentation.

Where a full primary source exists, it is cited in place of or alongside the standard. Turkey's reform is documented by the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye, which records Law No. 5083 of January 28, 2004, the six-zero cut, the E8 emission group of six denominations issued on January 1, 2005, the removal of the word "New" on January 1, 2009 and the withdrawal of the E8 notes on January 1, 2010 with redemption running to December 31, 2019. Syria's reform is documented by the text of Decree No. 293 of 2025 as published by SANA and by the Central Bank of Syria banknote gallery. Belarus is documented by Presidential Edict No. 450 of November 4, 2015, reported with the 10,000 to one ratio and the July 1, 2016 introduction date by BanknoteNews. Sierra Leone's 1,000 to one ratio comes from a Bank of Sierra Leone press release dated August 11, 2021, also via BanknoteNews. Zambia's three-zero rebasing and its January 1, 2013 introduction date are recorded in the same source (BanknoteNews), as is the January 1, 2018 introduction of São Tomé and Príncipe's new De La Rue family (BanknoteNews). Venezuela's three ratios and the exact dates of January 1, 2008 and August 20, 2018 are recorded by BanknoteNews alongside the Banco Central de Venezuela record.

For the pre-war and wartime reforms the sources are the standard scholarly and central-bank references: Bomberger and Makinen (1983) for the Hungarian forint conversion and the Bank of Greece for the November 1944 drachma. The Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table published by the Cato Institute dates the German, Greek, Yugoslav and Zimbabwean episodes themselves, though it records inflation rates rather than conversion ratios. Where a figure is order-of-magnitude rather than exact, it is shown in powers of ten rather than written out, because added digits at that scale stop carrying information.

Where a row is anchored on the ISO standard alone, be clear about what that does and does not establish. The ISO entry proves that one currency replaced another and fixes the month the old code left the standard. It does not supply the conversion ratio, which in those rows follows the published numismatic record for the currency, and it does not supply the day the reform took effect, which is why those rows show a month or a year rather than a full date. Rows whose source is a Planet Banknote country or museum page are linked to that page, and the page names the underlying reference where one exists.

What is deliberately absent: no currency conversion rates, no estimated values in other currencies and no invented dates. Two categories were left out on purpose. Currency-union and dollarization changeovers, such as the euro adoptions and Ecuador's move to the US dollar in 2000, are conversions between two different currencies rather than a rescaling of one, so they belong in a different table. Several widely repeated redenomination lists also carry years that are legislation dates rather than effective dates, and a handful of rows that appear elsewhere were dropped here because the ratio or the date could not be confirmed against a source we could read.

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