About
SerialValue is an independent reference for US paper money serial numbers. It exists because the honest answer to "what is my bill worth" is usually "face value", and almost nothing in this niche is willing to say so.
What it does
Three tools, each answering a different question. The value lookup prices a serial. The fancy serial checker tests the eight digits against 34 collector patterns and reports the computed odds for each. The star note lookup resolves a replacement note to the exact Bureau of Engraving and Printing print run it came from, out of 582 runs indexed from published production reports.
The rules it is built to
- Face value is an answer. When a note is worth what is printed on it, that is the headline, not a footnote after a hopeful maybe.
- Ranges, never a single price. The market for fancy serials sees a handful of comparable sales a year. One number would be a fabrication, so every figure is a band with its method disclosed.
- Odds are counted, not quoted. Every rarity figure is derived from the 99,999,999 serials a run can contain, and verified by enumerating all of them. None is copied from another site.
- Gaps are published. The coverage page lists what the data does not contain, because collectors find those gaps themselves and finding them unannounced is what destroys a reference.
- Nothing is sold here. No appraisals, no brokering, no dealer relationships, and no figure influenced by anyone who buys or sells notes.
What it will not tell you
It will not appraise your note, value it for insurance, or tell you what a specific buyer will pay. It cannot authenticate anything from a description. Where the underlying data runs out, the tools say so rather than returning a confident guess. Two sets of figures on this site have no source dataset behind them at all, and sources names both under the same heading as everything else rather than hiding them in a footnote.
Who builds it
SerialValue is built and maintained by one person, working from published Bureau of Engraving and Printing data and from first-principles arithmetic rather than from other currency sites. It is not affiliated with the BEP, the Federal Reserve, Paper Money Guaranty, PCGS, or any dealer or auction house.
Corrections
A correction with a citation is worth more to this site than any feature, and mistakes here have been found and fixed before: several published rarity counts were wrong at launch and were corrected once the arithmetic was checked against every serial a run can hold.
Send corrections to questions@serialvalue.com. A citation helps most: the BEP report and page for a print run, or the arithmetic for a rarity figure. Corrections are applied in the next build, and the page that carried the error says what changed.
The same address takes questions about how a figure was reached. It is not an appraisal service, and a photograph of a note cannot be valued from an email.
How the work is checked
Every published rarity figure is covered by a test, including one that enumerates all 99,999,999 possible serials and compares the result against what the tools report. The star note ingest re-runs monthly and fails the build if parse quality drops below 95% clean, so a change to the BEP's report layout surfaces before it can corrupt a published serial range. How every figure is worked out