How Banknotes Are Printed: Intaglio, Offset and Letterpress

Last updated: September 2026

Why does one banknote need four different printing processes?

Because each one does something the others physically cannot. Offset prints fine multi-colour backgrounds cheaply but lies flat. Intaglio builds a relief you can feel. Letterpress changes its image on every impression, the only way to give each note a unique serial. Screen printing alone lays ink thick enough to hold the flakes that make a numeral shift colour.

The logic is layered defence rather than one unbreakable trick. A scanner can approximate the offset layer, but the intaglio ridge needs a very high pressure press and a plate that took an engraver months, and screened optically variable ink needs a pigment supply chain that sells only to authorised security printers. That is also why hands-on authentication works: a fingertip across the portrait tests the intaglio pass, a tilt under a lamp tests the screen pass. Our reference on banknote security features covers what each layer looks like on a genuine example.

Why does intaglio produce the raised feel authenticators check first?

Intaglio leaves raised ink because the image is cut into the plate rather than raised on it. Engraved lines are packed with stiff, high-pigment ink, the plate surface is wiped clean, and the sheet is driven into those recesses under enormous pressure, so the ink stands on the sheet as a measurable ridge. That ridge is the most durable authentication cue on a banknote.

Old and modern intaglio differ in one respect. The earliest banknote engraving dampened the paper so it would stretch into the lines; since 1968 all United States currency has been printed dry, on specially made paper where press pressure alone forces the sheet into the engraving (Bureau of Engraving and Printing production history). The plates are the slow part: a master engraver's portrait die can take months. Our guide to intaglio printing and banknote engraving covers the burin, the acid, the lathe patterns and the latent image.

The practical upshot for collectors is simple: feel the note before you look at it. A genuine intaglio note has texture on the portrait, the numerals and usually the border lettering, so an issue that should carry engraving and is uniformly smooth is the first thing to investigate (how to spot a counterfeit banknote). Pressure and ink film degrade across a run, which is why a note struck early from a fresh plate has better eye appeal, a graded criterion our grading guide explains.

What does offset lithography contribute to a banknote?

Offset supplies everything flat, coloured and finely patterned: the tinted underprint, the guilloche lacework, the rainbow blends, the anti-copy moiré patterns and the two halves of a see-through register. It is indirect printing: ink goes onto a flat plate, then to a rubber blanket, and only then onto the sheet. That blanket is what "offset" describes, and it is why the process renders fine detail on textured rag paper so cleanly.

The security value comes less from the process than from the press configuration. Security presses print both sides of the sheet in one pass, so registration holds to a tolerance commercial printing never needs. That is what makes the see-through register possible: an incomplete shape front and back combining into one symbol against a light. Reproduce it in two desktop passes and the halves will not line up.

Offset also carries rainbow or iris printing, where inks blend gradually across the sheet with no visible boundary between colours, an effect a photocopier tends to band rather than reproduce. Many terms collectors meet in auction descriptions, from guilloche to underprint to register, describe this layer, and our banknote glossary defines them individually.

Why are serial numbers and seals printed last, by letterpress?

Serial numbers go on last because they are the only elements that change from note to note. Letterpress uses raised type, and its numbering boxes advance mechanically with each impression, so every sheet leaves the press carrying numbers no other sheet has. Reversing the order would mean re-registering a numbered sheet through a high-pressure press.

Letterpress also applies seals, series dates and signature blocks, and because the type strikes directly it often leaves a faint indentation on the reverse under raking light. Numbering is where accountability enters production: a damaged sheet cannot be reprinted with the same numbers without breaking the count, so issuing authorities substitute a specially marked replacement. That is why star notes and replacement notes exist and why they are scarcer than regular issues, and our guide to banknote serial numbers covers the formats country by country.

The same stage explains an entire collecting category. Specimen notes are genuine printings distributed to central banks for reference, distinguished precisely by what happened at the letterpress stage: zeroed serial numbers, a SPECIMEN overprint, sometimes a punch cancellation. Real design, real substrate, real plates. Only the last pass differs.

Screen printing is how colour-shifting ink gets onto a note

Screen printing pushes ink through a fine mesh stencil, the only process here that deposits a film thick enough to hold the microscopic interference flakes that produce optically variable ink. Those flakes reflect different wavelengths depending on viewing angle and need depth in the ink layer to orient themselves. A numeral that shifts from green to copper as you tilt it is screened, not offset.

The same process handles several other effects: iridescent stripes that flash a colour across a plain field, dynamic elements combining screened ink with a fine embossed or lens structure, and phosphorescent and infrared inks readable only under a specific lamp or sensor. All of them depend on ink depth rather than ink colour.

For a collector this is the fastest visual test on a modern high denomination, and the layer where novelty replicas most often give themselves away. A printed imitation of a colour-shifting numeral is a two-tone graphic that stays two-tone at every angle, while genuine optically variable ink transitions continuously and has a soft body under a fingertip quite unlike the sharp ridge of intaglio.

Who actually prints the world's money?

A small number of high-security printers make most of the world's banknotes. Some are state bodies printing only their own country's currency. Others are commercial printers taking contracts from many central banks at once, and a third group supplies the paper and the optical features rather than running the presses.

The split matters when you read a note. A commercial printer's work turns up across continents, which is why unrelated countries sometimes share a familiar portrait style or guilloche grammar. The table lists the names a collector meets most often, each taken from the printer's own statements or its central bank's.

That list is deliberately short. Our guide to who prints the world's money maps the full field, while De La Rue and the American Bank Note Company cover the two firms whose engraving a collector learns to recognise on sight.

What is a banknote actually printed on?

Most banknotes are printed on rag paper made from cotton, often blended with linen, and a growing minority on polymer film. United States currency paper is 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen with no wood pulp at all, which is why a note survives a wash cycle that would reduce ordinary paper to fibre, and a US note measures about 156 mm by 66.3 mm (Bureau of Engraving and Printing).

The substrate is not a passive carrier. Rag paper is where the watermark and the security thread are created, both during paper forming rather than printing. A true watermark is a variation in fibre density built into the wet sheet, which is why it reads from both sides and cannot be added afterwards. Our guide to banknote paper follows the furnish from bale to reel.

Polymer changed the equation. Australia produced the first modern polymer banknote in 1988, a ten dollar bicentennial commemorative developed with the Reserve Bank of Australia, CSIRO and the University of Melbourne, and by 1996 had converted every denomination. The Bank of England issued its first polymer five pound note in September 2016, and Canada converted between 2011 and 2013. Polymer takes offset and intaglio on coated areas, but with no fibre structure it holds no watermark or embedded thread, carrying a transparent window and holographic elements instead (polymer versus paper).

Substrate is also where crisis printing shows itself. German emergency issues of the early 1920s were produced on whatever was to hand, including linen, leather, silk and wood (notgeld emergency money). State printing tells the same story in the passes it skipped: many late 1923 Reichsbank issues went out with no reverse printing at all, and the first version of the 100 trillion mark note, dated 26 October 1923, is a plain one-sided design (geldscheine-online and Muenzkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).

What is the sequence of a modern print run?

The order is fixed because each stage depends on the one before it: the substrate is made first with watermark and thread inside, then offset lays the background, intaglio adds the relief, the sheets are inspected, letterpress overprints serials and seals, and finally the sheets are cut, counted and banded. Ink has to set between passes, so the stages are separated in time.

Not every note takes every stage, which is the most useful thing to know when you meet an unfamiliar issue. Many nineteenth-century notes are intaglio and letterpress only, and most emergency issues have no engraving at all. Grading interacts with the run too: centring is a graded criterion precisely because it is a print-run artefact rather than a circulation one (graded versus raw).

Go deeper: the How Money Is Made cluster

This page is the overview. Seven guides take one stage each and go further than an overview usefully can.

• Who prints the world's money? The security printers behind nearly every banknote, and how a central bank chooses between them.
• De La Rue: two centuries of printing the world's banknotes.
• The American Bank Note Company: its engravers, its specimens, and the notes and proofs that survive from its archive.
• Banknote paper: how cotton-linen currency paper is made, and how the watermark and thread get inside the sheet.
• Intaglio printing and banknote engraving: the burin, the acid, the lathe and the latent image.
• How a banknote is designed: from the central bank's brief to the press, and who the designers are.
• Banknote sizes around the world: a dimensions chart, why the United States went small in 1929, and the record holders.

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.

Once you can name the four passes, the rest of the library reads differently. Continue with banknote security features, how to spot a counterfeit banknote, and how to store banknotes. When you are ready to hold an example, browse certified graded banknotes or United States banknotes.