Chilean Peso (CLP)

About the Chilean Peso

The Chilean Peso (CLP) is the official currency of Chile, issued by the Banco Central de Chile and written with the symbol $. Its ISO 4217 numeric code is 152. The peso has no minor unit in circulation today: the Bank's current coin family runs from $1 to $500 with no centavo, a sub-unit accepted only temporarily after the peso's 1975 introduction, until the escudo it belonged to was fully phased out in 1976. Chile is the peso's sole issuing jurisdiction — it is not official or de facto legal tender in any other country.

The peso has floated freely since 1999, when the Banco Central de Chile abandoned the exchange-rate band system it had used until then — under which rates were fixed within a pre-set range rather than left to the market — and let the exchange rate move freely instead. The inflation-targeting framework that took over as the anchor for monetary policy was itself years in the making: the Bank had applied an explicit inflation objective only partially since 1990, in place of pure money-supply targeting, before formalising the framework in 1999 alongside the float, with a target of 3% annual inflation within a two-year horizon.

The peso in circulation today dates from 29 September 1975, when Decree Law 1,123 — issued 30 June 1975 — restored the peso as Chile's monetary unit at a rate of 1,000 old escudos to one new peso, replacing a currency eroded by high inflation. The escudo had itself replaced an earlier peso in 1959 for the same reason. The Banco Central de Chile, established in 1925 with the exclusive legal right to issue banknotes, has issued the currency throughout; production merged with the national mint in 1927.

In the Bank for International Settlements' Triennial Central Bank Survey, the peso was on one side of about 0.3% of average daily global foreign exchange turnover in April 2025 — roughly US$24 billion on a net-net basis. That figure matched the US$24 billion recorded in the April 2022 survey and was double the US$12 billion recorded in April 2016, tracking the broader growth of emerging-market currency trading over the period.

The Banco Central de Chile's current banknote family — $1,000, $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 and $20,000 pesos — entered circulation between 2009 and 2011, keeping each prior series' historical portrait on the obverse while adding a Chilean landscape and native animal, plus the copihue flower and the Mapuche sun symbol Antú, to the reverse. Six coin denominations exist, from $1 to $500, though minting of the $1 and $5 coins ceased in November 2017 on cost grounds; both remain legal tender with unlimited circulation.