SerialHunt

SerialHunt tells you whether a US bill is worth keeping, from the serial number printed on it.

Give it a serial and it reads the note the way a collector would: the Federal Reserve Bank, the series (worked out from the serial when it can be), and every fancy pattern in the eight digits, such as a radar, repeater, ladder, solid, binary, birthday or low serial, each with its exact odds counted across all 100,000,000 possible serials.

For a star note, the replacement note marked with a star in place of the last letter, it finds the exact print run the serial came from in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's production figures and says how many star notes shared it. A star is only as scarce as its run, so this is the number that decides whether to keep one. It also says when a serial falls in a stretch the press skipped, so no such note was ever issued.

Ask which star notes had the smallest print runs for a denomination, series or Federal Reserve Bank, what a pattern means and how rare it is, or which series the figures cover. The figures run from Series 1963 to the current series and update weekly from the Bureau's monthly reports, through the uspapermoney.info archive for older series.

SerialHunt gives no prices and makes no authenticity claims, on purpose: no price guide for US paper money can be licensed, and a serial cannot show whether a note is genuine. Every answer links to the same result on the SerialHunt web lookup. Every tool is read-only and no account is needed.