Printer Profile

De La Rue: Two Centuries of Printing the World's Banknotes

A Guernsey newspaper in 1813, playing cards in 1831, postage stamps in 1855, and then, in 1860, the first banknotes: three denominations for the Government of Mauritius. The firm that began as Thomas de la Rue's small print shop is now the company the Bank of England names as the printer of its notes, and the name behind more commercially printed currency than any other.

Founded 1813 First notes 1860 Mauritius Basingstoke, UK

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Last updated: September 2026

Who is De La Rue and what does the company print?

De La Rue is a commercial high security printer based in Basingstoke, England. It designs and prints banknotes for central banks, makes its own SAFEGUARD polymer substrate and banknote security features, and sells cash cycle software. It is not a state printworks: it competes for contracts, and its work turns up on notes across four continents.

The company describes itself as the world's largest commercial banknote printer, serving governments, central banks and state printworks (De La Rue company history). Three figures it publishes give the scale better than any adjective: 54 percent of issuing authorities buy De La Rue products, 49 issuing authorities have at least one polymer denomination, and 60 percent of all commercially printed banknotes since 2020 were designed by De La Rue (De La Rue, About).

That last number is the one collectors feel without knowing it. A design house with that share leaves a house style: the way a guilloche field is layered behind a portrait, the proportions of a window, the grammar of a security thread. If two unrelated countries' notes feel like cousins, a shared designer is often the reason. Our overview of who prints the world's money sets De La Rue beside its rivals, and how banknotes are printed explains the presses all of them run.

How did Thomas de la Rue start the business in 1813?

Thomas de la Rue launched his first commercial venture in Guernsey in 1813, a newspaper called Le Miroir Politique, and a print business grew out of it. He moved to London in 1821, where he began with straw hats before turning properly to printing and fancy stationery.

The pivot that made the firm was playing cards. In 1831 Thomas de la Rue registered a patent for improvements to card printing, including early colour work, and in 1832 he was granted a Royal Letters Patent by William IV. In 1844 he hired the architect and designer Owen Jones to draw the backs of cards that had until then been plain, and Jones's patterns became influential well beyond the company (De La Rue company history).

Two more Victorian lines mattered more than they look. Railway tickets, first ordered in 1841, had the firm producing a million and a half tickets a week by 1846, which is a lesson in high volume numbered printing. And in 1853 De La Rue won its first stamp contract, for Board of Inland Revenue receipt stamps, using a new typographic process that produced the world's first surface printed stamp. Two years later came the first postage stamp contract, the Fourpenny Carmine, engraved by Jean Joubert de la Ferté. Stamps taught the company engraving, registration and accountability at scale, and they are what led to banknotes.

When did De La Rue print its first banknotes?

De La Rue printed its first paper money in 1860 for the Government of Mauritius: 10 shilling, 1 pound and 5 pound notes, produced in colour and with micro lettering. The company treats that order as the start of its currency business, which is why it dates its banknote experience from 1860 rather than 1813.

Britain came later and under pressure. On the outbreak of war in 1914 the UK Government commissioned De La Rue to print 10 shilling notes, and the works delivered 2.5 million notes in the first five weeks. China became a major customer from 1934 and stayed one for about 15 years. During the Second World War the company printed currency for a number of occupied countries and hid it in a quarry until it could be delivered after the war. On 11 September 1940 the Bunhill Row factories and offices in London were destroyed in the Blitz, and other firms helped De La Rue deliver its critical orders anyway.

De La Rue timeline: 1813 to today

The dates below are taken from De La Rue's published company history. They trace the arc from a Guernsey newspaper to a currency specialist: playing cards, then stamps, then notes, then a long twentieth century of acquisitions, then a hard decade of disposals that left only currency.

All dates above are as published by De La Rue on its company history page. Information for former shareholders now sits under a separate historic De La Rue plc section of the site.

How did De La Rue come to print Bank of England notes?

The Bank of England used to print its own notes. In 2003 De La Rue signed a seven year contract to print and supply sterling and took over the Bank's manufacturing operation, and the Bank renewed the arrangement in 2009. The Bank of England states plainly that it works closely with De La Rue, the company that currently prints its notes.

The relationship is older than the printing contract. Portals, the paper mill De La Rue bought in 1995, had supplied the Bank of England since 1724, so the paper side of the partnership runs back three centuries. What changed in 2003 was the presses: instead of the Bank employing printers, a commercial contractor took over the works and the Bank became the customer (Bank of England, Our banknotes).

All four Bank of England denominations now circulate on polymer, in King Charles III and Queen Elizabeth II versions. The next series is already being designed: the Bank announced in March 2026 that nature would be the theme, and on 3 June 2026 it opened a public consultation on a shortlist of native species, from the bottlenose dolphin and pine marten to the Atlantic puffin and the marsh fritillary butterfly, with voting running to 3 July (Bank of England news release, 3 June 2026). For the longer British story see the history of Bank of England notes and Queen Elizabeth II banknotes.

What is SAFEGUARD and how did De La Rue enter polymer?

SAFEGUARD is De La Rue's own polymer banknote substrate. The first note printed on it was the Fiji 5 dollar, unveiled in 2012 and circulating from January 2013. De La Rue says it is the only polymer substrate provider that also manufactures finished banknotes, so it can sell the film and the printed note together.

Polymer did not start with De La Rue. Australia produced the first circulating polymer note in 1988, a commemorative 10 dollar developed by the Reserve Bank's own printer with the CSIRO, and that note was also the first banknote to carry a diffractive optical effect (Note Printing Australia). De La Rue arrived in the substrate market more than two decades later, which is why the Fiji note of 2012 matters: it marked a British commercial printer competing on film rather than paper.

The company added a second polymer production line at Westhoughton in England in 2022, the same year it ended its supply agreement with Portals Paper and freed itself to buy banknote paper from several sources. SAFEGUARD's selling points are the familiar polymer ones: non porous so notes stay cleaner, recyclable at end of life, and windows that are difficult to reproduce (De La Rue, SAFEGUARD substrate). If you want the collector's view of the tradeoff, read polymer versus paper banknotes and how banknote paper is made.

What happened to De La Rue after 2019?

De La Rue spent the years after 2019 shrinking back to currency. It sold its Identity Solutions business in 2019, launched a turnaround plan with an associated fundraise in 2020, sold the Authentication Division to Crane NXT for 300 million pounds under a 2024 agreement, and in 2025 agreed a takeover by the US investment firm Atlas Holdings.

The pattern is easier to read backwards. Through the 1990s and 2000s the company had spread far beyond notes: smart cards, cash processing machines, holograms, identity systems, a stake in the Camelot consortium that won the UK National Lottery licence in 1994, even fountain pens a century earlier. One by one those went. The Camelot interest was sold in 2010, Cash Processing Solutions in 2016, Identity Solutions in 2019, and Authentication under the 2024 agreement with Crane NXT.

The disposals cut both ways for a collector. A narrower company is a more specialised one, and the remaining business is design, substrate, security features and printing. It also means the De La Rue name now appears in fewer places than it did, and pieces of its old empire sit inside other firms: Oberthur, for one, records that it acquired De La Rue Card Systems in 1999 to create Oberthur Card Systems (Oberthur Fiduciaire).

Which De La Rue banknotes should collectors know?

Five issues mark the turning points, and each one is documented in the company's own history rather than inferred. They run from the 1860 Mauritius notes through the wartime British 10 shilling to the two polymer firsts, Fiji in 2013 and the Churchill fiver in 2016.

A word of caution before you go shopping for "a De La Rue note". Most circulating banknotes carry no printer imprint at all, and the ones that do are usually older colonial and commercial issues where the imprint sits in tiny type along the bottom border. Attribution for modern notes generally comes from the issuing central bank or the printer, not from the note itself. The same is true of the American Bank Note Company, whose imprint is far more often visible on the note.

Planet Banknote lists world notes country by country rather than by printer, so the practical route is to pick the country whose story interests you and check the description for an imprint or catalogue attribution. Start at banknotes by country, and if you are new to attributions our Pick number guide and banknote glossary explain how printers, series and estampas are recorded.

How does De La Rue compare with the other big printers?

De La Rue is the largest commercial printer, but it is not the oldest and not the only one of its kind. Giesecke+Devrient of Munich was founded in 1852 and is still family owned. Crane Currency traces its papermaking to the 1770s and now prints for more than 50 central banks. Oberthur Fiduciaire of Rennes dates from 1842. All of them compete for the same contracts.

Giesecke+Devrient printed its first banknote in 1854, for the Weimar Bank, and by 1865 was printing for Switzerland (Giesecke+Devrient history). Crane Currency, whose ancestor supplied paper for American securities in the eighteenth century, won the contract for United States banknote paper in 1879 and today runs plants in Massachusetts, Sweden and Malta (Crane Currency history). What separates De La Rue from both is breadth of design work rather than age: it is the design share, not the founding date, that shows up on the most notes.

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.