Australian Dollar (AUD)

About the Australian Dollar

The Australian Dollar (AUD) is the official currency of Australia, represented by the dollar sign ($) and issued as banknotes by the Reserve Bank of Australia, the nation's central bank. It also serves Australia's external territories of Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Norfolk Island, and the Pacific island states of Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu. One dollar divides into 100 cents; circulating coins are struck by the Royal Australian Mint on behalf of the Treasury.

The Australian dollar is a free-floating currency: its exchange rate has been determined by market supply and demand since it was floated on 12 December 1983, when most remaining capital controls were also removed. The Reserve Bank of Australia does not target a level for the exchange rate, retaining discretion to intervene only in exceptional circumstances, such as a disorderly or dysfunctional market. The float allows the Bank to set monetary policy according to domestic economic conditions.

Decimal currency arrived on 14 February 1966, when dollars and cents replaced the Australian pound with its shillings and pence after years of planning by a Decimal Currency Board. A national competition considered names such as the "austral" and the "royal" before "dollar" was chosen. The changeover was supported by one of the country's most memorable public-education campaigns, fronted by the cartoon character "Dollar Bill". The Royal Australian Mint has struck more than 15 billion circulating coins since 1966.

The Australian dollar ranked seventh among the world's most traded currencies in the Bank for International Settlements' 2025 Triennial Central Bank Survey, appearing on one side of roughly 6 per cent of global over-the-counter foreign exchange turnover in April 2025 — an average of about US$582 billion in trades each day. In the spot market, roughly three-quarters of that turnover — US$154.5 billion of AUD's US$205.1 billion average daily spot turnover — was against the US dollar, its dominant counterpart by a wide margin.

Australia's banknotes were the world's first complete series printed on polymer, a technology developed jointly by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the CSIRO to keep the notes ahead of counterfeiters and make them more durable than paper. Five polymer denominations circulate — $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 — alongside six coins of 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1 and $2. One- and two-cent coins were minted until 1990 and withdrawn from circulation in 1992.