Last updated: September 2026

What is the most expensive banknote ever sold at auction?

The 1890 $1,000 Treasury Note catalogued Friedberg 379b, the small red seal Grand Watermelon, sold for $3,290,000 at Heritage Auctions during the Florida United Numismatists convention in Orlando in January 2014. It shared that convention week with a Brasher Doubloon at $4,582,500 and an Olsen-Hawn-Greensboro 1913 Liberty Head nickel that also made $3.29 million (CoinWeek, January 16, 2014).

What the buyer was bidding on was the only obtainable example of its variety. Two Fr. 379b notes are known and one is in private hands, out of seven Grand Watermelons in total, of which all but three sit permanently in government collections (Stack's Bowers Galleries, June 2020). When only one example can ever be bought, comparable sales stop setting the ceiling and desire sets it instead.

No record-keeping organization's published entry for this category could be checked while this page was written, so the ranking below rests entirely on reported sale results rather than on anyone's record certificate. If a higher result is documented, it belongs in the table, and the table is reviewed each month. Our page on the Grand Watermelon note covers that single note's provenance in detail.

The record table: documented banknote auction results

This table ranks individual banknotes by the price reported for a public auction sale. It excludes private treaty sales, which are covered further down, and multi-note lots. Rows three, five and nine are all Fr. 379a Grand Watermelons: rows three and nine are the same note thirteen years apart, and row five is the second of the two examples of that variety in private hands.

Prices are reproduced in the currency the source reports and are not converted. Where a report does not say whether the buyer's premium is included, this table says "not stated" rather than assuming.

Why are the top records all United States notes?

Because the United States combines three things that no other market has at once: a nineteenth century high denomination series that was almost entirely redeemed, a large and wealthy collector base, and a habit of selling great collections as named, catalogued single owner events. The first sets the scarcity, the second sets the demand, and the third sets the stage.

The single owner effect is easy to measure. Four Stack's Bowers sales of the Joel R. Anderson Collection between March 2018 and February 2019 totalled $34,126,980, which made it the most valuable United States paper money cabinet ever sold at auction. Three notes passed the million dollar mark in the final session alone, and nearly a quarter of the lots exceeded $100,000 (Stack's Bowers, March 2019). Fifteen of the thirty one rows above come from those four sessions.

The scarcity side is equally concrete. In the first Anderson session, seven lots passed $500,000 and several carried census statements that explain the prices: the only privately held Fr. 187b $1,000 Legal Tender of 1880 at $960,000, the only publicly available Fr. 209a $500 Interest Bearing Note of 1861 at $660,000, and the finest of two privately held Fr. 1218g $1,000 Gold Certificates of 1882 at $576,000 (Stack's Bowers, March 2018). Our ranking of the most valuable United States banknotes looks at the same top tier by class of note.

What is the most expensive world banknote sold at auction?

The best documented result for a banknote issued outside the United States is $360,000, paid in January 2025 for the 1870 Dominion of Canada $2 payable at Victoria, catalogued DC-3e and graded PMG Choice Very Fine 35. It is the only known example of its type, from an issue previously catalogued as having no known issued notes.

Stack's Bowers reported the result alongside a Canadian dollar figure of $518,000 CAD and described the note as previously considered lost. Roughly 24,000 were printed and shipped to the Pacific coast, and the survivor surfaced in Europe. Not even the National Currency Collection in Ottawa holds one (Stack's Bowers, January 2025).

Three other world results sit close behind. A 1975 China 2 Yuan proof, a rejected design featuring the oil worker Wang Jinxi, made $240,000 in Hong Kong in March 2019 against an estimate of $75,000 to $100,000, and nine of the ten top prices in that sale were for certified notes. A Hong Kong Oriental Bank Corporation $5 handwritten June 1, 1860 brought 161,200 pounds at Dix Noonan Webb in August 2021 after PMG confirmed the date, making it the earliest known fully issued Hong Kong note to survive (PMG, August 2021). A Netherlands Bank 100 Gulden of 1814 to 1838 reached $114,000 at Heritage in June 2025 and set a record for any Dutch note.

One larger world figure exists but does not belong in a single note ranking. A quartet of People's Republic of China 1953 10 Yuan notes sold as one lot for $432,000 at Stack's Bowers in Hong Kong in October 2023 (Stack's Bowers, October 2023). Four notes in one lot is not a per note record, which is why it sits here rather than in the table.

Do these prices include the buyer's premium?

Sometimes, and the reports do not always say. A price realized normally includes the buyer's premium that the auction house adds to the hammer price, but only some published releases state it outright, so this page marks each row according to what its source actually says.

Two examples show the difference. Paper Money Guaranty's report on the $456,000 Series 1928 $10,000 Federal Reserve Note ends with the plain line that prices realized include the buyer's premium (PMG, May 2021). Stack's Bowers stated the same for its January 2025 NYINC auction totals (Stack's Bowers, February 2025). Most of the older releases in the table simply give a figure.

The one row labelled differently is the Fr. 202a $50 Interest Bearing Note of 1861, where the catalog description printed an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000 and then an actual hammer of $1,020,000 against a sold figure of the same amount. Because the source uses the word hammer, the table repeats it rather than tidying it up. When you compare records across houses and decades, this is the detail that quietly moves numbers by fifteen to twenty percent.

What actually drives a record price?

Four things, in roughly this order: how many examples a bidder could ever buy, the certified grade, the provenance chain, and whether the note is famous enough to have a nickname. Face value is not on the list, which is why $1,000 notes and $20 notes appear in the same table.

Obtainability outranks rarity. A note with seven survivors of which three are buyable behaves very differently from a note with seven survivors of which one is buyable, and the Grand Watermelon demonstrates both cases in the same design: the Fr. 379b at $3,290,000 was the sole obtainable example of its variety, while the Fr. 379a has two private examples and has traded at $1,092,500, $1,525,500 and $2,040,000.

Grade then multiplies whatever scarcity exists. Every seven figure result whose report names a holder was a certified note, in a PMG or PCGS Currency holder, and the world market is even more dependent on certification: nine of the top ten prices in the March 2019 Stack's Bowers Hong Kong sale went to PMG certified lots. Our comparison of graded versus raw banknotes and our PMG versus PCGS breakdown cover what the holders actually certify.

Provenance is the quiet multiplier. The finest Grand Watermelon carries a chain running through F.C.C. Boyd, James Wade, Robert Friedberg, Amon Carter Jr., Q. David Bowers and Joel R. Anderson, and it is the plate note on the cover of 100 Greatest American Currency Notes by Bowers and David M. Sundman, where the type ranks first (PCGS, October 2020). A named pedigree tells a bidder the note has been examined by the people who would know.

Do banknote records always climb?

No. The long trend is upward, but individual notes fall as well as rise, and the same object can sell for less a decade later. The clearest case in this table is the 1891 $1,000 Marcy Silver Certificate, which changed hands privately for $2,600,000 in 2013 and then brought $1,920,000 at public auction in February 2019.

The upward trend is real where the population is fixed and the audience is growing. The Fr. 202a $50 Interest Bearing Note traded at $10,000 in a Rarcoa sale in August 1970, $605,000 through Currency Auctions of America in May 2001, $368,000 at Heritage in February 2005 and then $1,020,000 in August 2018. The 1863 $500 Legal Tender Note went from a $621,000 record in 2005 to $900,000 in March 2018, and the finest Grand Watermelon almost doubled from $1,092,500 in October 2005 to $2,040,000 thirteen years later.

The counter examples matter just as much. The Fr. 202a fell between 2001 and 2005 before tripling. The Marcy note's private price in 2013 was set in a negotiation with one buyer, and its 2019 price was set in a room. Records that hold for a decade, like the January 2014 result at the top of this table, are the ones to watch, because they tell you the market has not yet produced a bidder willing to go further. For the survivor counts behind these prices, see our companion page on the rarest banknotes in the world.

Which famous prices are not auction records at all?

Several of the largest numbers attached to banknotes came from private transactions, not from a saleroom, and mixing the two is how bad rankings get built. The largest documented private figure is $2,600,000 for the 1891 $1,000 Marcy Silver Certificate, announced in June 2013 as part of the largest private transaction in the history of paper money collecting.

Two more sit outside the auction record book entirely. The complete Waterlow and Sons set of Zanzibar banknotes, including the 1920 500 Rupees, changed hands by private treaty in 2017 at a price that was never disclosed. And the Series 1934 $100,000 Gold Certificate, the highest face value the United States ever printed, has never been offered at public auction, because the issued examples are held by the Smithsonian, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and two Federal Reserve Banks.

The practical lesson for a collector is the one this whole page is built on. A price is only a record if you can name the house, the date and the lot. Everything else is a story. If you are working out what a note in your own collection is worth, our guide to what determines banknote value and our banknote grading guide are the place to start, and the most valuable world banknotes ranking covers the notes a collector can realistically own.

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.