New Taiwan Dollar (TWD)

About the New Taiwan Dollar

The New Taiwan Dollar (TWD) is the official currency of Taiwan, issued by the Central Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and written with the dollar sign $, usually as NT$ to distinguish it from other dollar currencies; in Chinese, amounts are given in 元 (yuán). Its ISO 4217 alphabetic code is TWD and its numeric code is 901. The dollar formally divides into 100 cents, but the smallest coin in ordinary circulation is NT$1 and cash amounts are whole dollars.

The NT dollar is a managed float. Since the establishment of the Taipei Foreign Exchange Market in February 1979, a flexible exchange rate system has been in place and the NT dollar's exchange rate has been determined by the market; the Central Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan) states that it steps in when the market is disrupted by seasonal or irregular factors. There is no peg, central parity or fluctuation band against any currency.

The New Taiwan dollar was first issued by the Bank of Taiwan in 1949, and 1949-series subsidiary coins denominated in jiao — tenths of a dollar — circulated alongside it. On July 1, 2000, regulations of the Central Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan) made the NT dollar the national currency of the Republic of China, issued by the central bank itself; nearly all banknotes inscribed with the Bank of Taiwan's name stopped circulating from July 1, 2002, and remain exchangeable at Bank of Taiwan branches.

USD/TWD is among the currency pairs reported individually in the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey, the benchmark measure of global foreign exchange activity. In April 2025, trading involving the New Taiwan dollar averaged US$116 billion per day on a net-net basis, ranking it the 17th most traded currency in the survey's tables; global turnover across all currencies averaged US$9.6 trillion per day.

Cash circulates in five banknote denominations — NT$100, NT$200, NT$500, NT$1,000 and NT$2,000 — and five coins from NT$1 to NT$50. The NT$1,000 note dominates: at the end of 2025 it accounted for 89.74% of the value of banknotes in circulation, followed by the NT$100 at 4.11% and the NT$500 at 3.17%. On October 23, 2025 the central bank launched a program to redesign the banknotes, which had circulated for some 24 years.