Currency in Circulation: $2.42T, and Why It Isn’t the Money Supply

Currency in circulation is the physical cash. Federal Reserve notes and US Mint coins, held outside bank vaults and the Fed’s own reserves. In the United States it totaled $2.42 trillion in October 2025 (FRED CURRCIR, Federal Reserve H.4.1 release). October 2025 is the last month the series covers: the Fed discontinued it and named a weekly successor, WCURCIR.

We hold no currency-in-circulation series of our own. Every figure on this page comes from a named Federal Reserve release, not our IMF-based broad-money dataset. That’s the honest way to state a number we don’t own.

What “currency in circulation” actually counts

Physical notes (BEP) and coins (US Mint) held by the public and businesses — not sitting in a bank vault, not sitting in the Fed’s own reserve accounts. It’s the cash a person could physically hold in their hand. $2.42 trillion of it existed as of October 2025, or roughly $2.4 trillion in circulation, rounded to one decimal.

Cash sitting inside a bank’s own vault doesn’t count either. Vault cash is a separate Fed reporting line. It’s held, but not yet handed to a customer — so not yet “in circulation” by the Fed’s own definition.

That figure is the bottom layer of a stack. Currency sits inside M1. FRED describes M1 as “currency, demand deposits, and OCDs (before May 2020) or other liquid deposits (beginning May 2020),” added together. It read $19.83 trillion in June 2026 (FRED M1SL). FRED used to publish the currency component of M1 plus demand deposits on its own, as CURRDD. That one was retired at the same time as CURRCIR. M1 in turn sits inside M2, the Fed’s broader measure, at $23.16 trillion the same month. Currency is the smallest, most tangible piece of that stack, and by some distance. Set the last cash print ($2.42T, October 2025) against those two June 2026 readings and the step from cash to M1 alone multiplies it about eight times; M2 is roughly ten times the cash inside it. Those are approximations, because CURRCIR stops eight months before the M1 and M2 figures do.

Who actually prints US money — and who doesn’t

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing prints Federal Reserve notes; the US Mint strikes coins. Between them they make all the physical banknotes and coins in the country. We hold no sourced figure for how many notes get printed each year, and we are not going to estimate one. The BEP publishes its own yearly print order, and that is the number to check.

Neither agency decides how much money exists. The Federal Reserve orders new notes and coins from both. It pushes them out through the banks and pulls worn ones back in. It makes nothing itself. That is a different job from growing the money supply, which happens mostly through bank lending, not a print order. Two agencies, two mechanisms, two very different numbers: physical currency’s entire stock is $2.42 trillion; the money supply it sits inside is $30.68 trillion (our own broad-money read, 2025-12).

If you searched “which country prints the most money” and meant it in the money-supply sense — how fast a country’s bank deposits are expanding — that’s a growth-rate question, not a printing-press one. It’s answered at money printer ranking. That split — printing money vs creating money — is the whole disambiguation this page exists to draw.

The ratio nobody puts in one place: how much of the money supply is actual cash

8.06%. In September 2025 — the closest same-month reading we can pair across both series — physical currency in circulation stood at $2.41 trillion against $29.88 trillion in US broad money. Total dollars in circulation is a small slice of what people mean by “the money supply.”

We computed that ratio ourselves, from two different sources: the Fed’s own CURRCIR figure, and our own IMF-based broad-money read. Both are matched to the same month, so the comparison is fair. The digital vs physical dollars split is stark. More than 90% of US broad money exists only as entries on a bank’s ledger — a checking balance, a savings balance, a money-market fund share — never printed, never minted, created the instant a bank issues a loan. That’s the whole reason “money printer go brrr” is a metaphor rather than a literal description of what happened. The printing press accounts for roughly one-twelfth of the stack it gets blamed for inflating. We walk through that metaphor, and its own arithmetic error, at money printer go brrr.

“Printing money” vs. expanding the money supply

Both get called “printing money” in ordinary conversation. They’re not the same mechanism, or the same agency, or remotely the same order of magnitude. One manufactures paper and metal objects; the other creates ledger entries — and the second one is roughly twelve times larger. “Printing money” vs creating money is the distinction this whole page turns on, and it’s the one the phrase itself hides.

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