Coverage
This page exists because collectors find the gaps in a dataset on their own, and finding them unannounced is what destroys a reference site. Here is precisely what the star note print-run data contains, and what it does not.
The boundary, in one paragraph
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing's online production archive begins with fiscal year 2003. Everything in this dataset is derived from those monthly reports, which means it covers star runs for series 1999 through 2025 and nothing earlier. Star runs from series 1976 to 1998 would have to be hand-compiled from printed references. They are not here, and the lookup says it has no coverage rather than guessing.
| Star runs indexed | 582 |
|---|---|
| Denomination + prefix keys | 220 |
| Series covered | 1999–2025 |
| Denominations | $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100 |
| Districts represented | 12 of 12 |
| Runs parsed but withheld | 74 |
| Scarcity threshold | 640,000 notes |
By denomination
Coverage is uneven, and the unevenness is real rather than an artefact — the BEP simply prints more replacement runs for some denominations than others. A denomination with few indexed runs is more likely to return "no recorded run" for a legitimate note.
| Denomination | Runs | Prefixes | Districts | Series span | Run sizes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1 | 143 | 12 | 12 | 1999–2021 | 25,000–9,600,000 |
| $2 | 33 | 12 | 12 | 2003–2021 | 8,000–3,200,000 |
| $5 | 60 | 34 | 12 | 1999–2021 | 125,000–4,352,000 |
| $10 | 38 | 28 | 10 | 2001–2021 | 9,600–3,200,000 |
| $20 | 111 | 53 | 12 | 1999–2017 | 128,000–6,400,000 |
| $50 | 32 | 23 | 8 | 2001–2021 | 64,000–3,200,000 |
| $100 | 165 | 58 | 12 | 2001–2025 | 32,000–25,600,000 |
What is not in here
- Star runs before series 1999. The archive does not go back that far. This is the largest gap and the one most likely to affect an inherited note.
- 74 runs the parser flagged. Rows whose figures could not be read unambiguously are dropped rather than guessed at. A withheld run is better than a published wrong serial range, and it means a small number of genuine notes will return no match.
- Regular notes. This is a star note dataset. Print runs for non-replacement notes are not indexed, and they are not what decides value on an ordinary note anyway.
- Denominations without all twelve districts represented: $10 (10 of 12), $50 (8 of 12). A note from a district with no indexed run for its denomination will return no match even though the note is perfectly genuine.
- Anything that is not a Federal Reserve Note. Silver certificates, United States Notes, national bank notes and large-size issues have no print-run data here.
Where the tools will mislead you if you let them
Two limitations are worth stating plainly, because in both cases the tool will return something that looks like an answer.
- Silver certificates are not Federal Reserve Notes. The letter before the serial is a block letter, not a Federal Reserve district. Pattern detection on the eight digits is completely valid; the district and series decoding is not, and should be ignored for those notes. The same applies to any non-FRN issue.
- A $1 or $2 serial cannot identify its series on its own. Those denominations carry no series letter, so a lookup often matches runs in several series at once. The tool reports every candidate and asks for the year from the face of the note rather than picking one.
How current this is
The ingest re-runs monthly and opens a pull request with any changes. It fails if parse quality drops below 95% clean, which is how a change to the BEP's report layout surfaces before it can corrupt a published serial range. Of the 582 runs currently indexed, 113 are scarce by run size and 278 are common.
Sources names every dataset behind these figures, including the two that have none. Methodology shows the derivations.