South African Rand (ZAR)

About the South African Rand

The South African Rand (ZAR) is the official currency of South Africa, issued by the South African Reserve Bank and written with the symbol R. One rand divides into 100 cents. Introduced in 1961, the rand also circulates beyond South Africa through the Common Monetary Area: it is legal tender in Eswatini and is used alongside the national currencies of Lesotho and Namibia, which are held at one-to-one parity with it.

The rand floats freely. The South African Reserve Bank states that South Africa "adheres to a floating exchange rate policy, where the nominal exchange rate is determined by market forces", and it intervenes in the foreign exchange market to smooth abrupt and severe adjustments, to support orderly market functioning, and for financial-stability reasons — not to defend any particular level. Monetary policy is anchored instead by an inflation target, revised in 2025 to a point target of 3% with a tolerance band of one percentage point.

The rand replaced the South African pound on 14 February 1961, roughly three and a half months before South Africa left the Commonwealth to become a republic, with one pound exchanged for two rand under the new decimal system. The currency takes its name from the Witwatersrand, the ridge where gold was discovered. Its issuer, the South African Reserve Bank, opened on 30 June 1921 and is the oldest central bank in Africa; every banknote and coin it has issued since 1961 remains legal tender.

The rand is an actively traded emerging-market currency. In the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey of April 2025, it was on one side of 0.8% of global over-the-counter foreign exchange turnover — about US$78 billion per day — making it the highest-placed African currency in the survey. Most rand trading occurs against the US dollar: the USD/ZAR pair alone accounted for 0.7% of global turnover in the same survey.

South Africa's banknotes and coins were upgraded on 3 May 2023. The five banknotes — R10, R20, R50, R100 and R200 — carry Nelson Mandela's portrait on the front and one of the Big Five animals on the back, from the rhinoceros on the R10 to the leopard on the R200. Six coin denominations remain in circulation — 10c, 20c, 50c, R1, R2 and R5 — and the 2023 upgrade gave the R2 a new springbok design and the R5 a new southern-right-whale design; minting of the 1c, 2c and 5c coins has been discontinued. New and older designs co-circulate at the same value.