(NEXSTAR) – A banknote featuring Donald Trump’s signature may never be rare or even valuable, but a “star note” certainly might.
Star notes, also known as replacement notes, are U.S. banknotes that feature a star symbol in place of the letter that usually appears at the end of the serial number. But unlike other valuable variations of paper currency — including bills featuring a printing error or an ink splatter — the marking on a “star note” is not there by mistake.
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The Bureau of Printing and Engraving (BEP) deliberately prints a sheet of star notes if its inspectors detect any imperfections on a sheet of bills (of any denomination) that already made it through the manufacturing process.
“If a note was damaged in production and they caught the problem, they pull that sheet out — with the damaged items — and then do a replacement,” said Doug Mudd, the curator and director of the American Numismatics Association’s Edward C. Rochette Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
And rather than reprint the exact same sheet with the same serial numbers, which can be “costly and time consuming,” the BEP uses a new star sheet with its “own special serial number” with a star at the end, for continuity, the agency explains.
A bill featuring a star at then end of the serial number signifies that the Bureau of Printing and Engraving (BEP) printed the note as a replacement for a sheet of imperfect bills. (Getty Images)
A representative for the BEP was not available to discuss how many of these star notes might currently be in circulation. But Mudd, speaking with Nexstar, estimated that replacement banknotes make up “about 1 in every 250–600 notes, depending on the denomination and series.”
“I have rarely encountered them in circulation — but I have seen them,” Mudd told Nexstar, recounting a time he found a star banknote right before he was scheduled to speak at a convention.
“I mentioned to a friend that it would be nice to have a star note to help illustrate my talk, [and] lo and behold, I looked in my wallet, and I had a $1 star note,” Mudd said.
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Still, there are significantly more star notes in circulation than there are notes with printing errors, meaning they’re not quite as valuable as the latter. But depending on the series, the denomination and the overall condition of a replacement banknote, the bill could be worth many times its face value to a collector.
Auction sites and currency exchanges including US Currency Auctions and APMEX can give sellers a general idea of how much their star banknotes are worth, as could a local currency appraiser. Heritage Auctions in Texas keeps an online archive of banknotes that sold in previous years, with many rare specimens (older bills, notes with low serial numbers, top-condition examples) fetching tens of thousands of dollars apiece.
Confirmed sales on eBay indicate that more commonplace star notes can also sell for decent sums — like a crisp $1 star note from 2006 that sold for $30, or a $5 bill from 1999 that went for $54 — though not nearly as much as their rarer counterparts.
Then again, not all banknote collectors (and especially not the most “hardcore” ones) are in it for the money, according to Mudd.
“Some collectors just want one of every different type of note,” he said.
