Reserve-currency composition
How the world holds its reserves
The currency composition of the world’s allocated official foreign-exchange reserves, quarterly from Q1 1999 to Q1 2026, from the IMF’s COFER database. Shares are of the allocated portion of reserves (the part central banks report by currency). This page carries the five major currencies, the US dollar, euro, yen, pound sterling and renminbi; the story of the dollar’s share is told by the series itself, not asserted.
Currency shares of allocated reserves, Q1 1999–present
Each line is a currency’s share of allocated reserves, in percent, across 109 quarters. The dollar sits far above every other currency; the euro is a distant second; the renminbi’s line begins in Q4 2016, when COFER first reported it separately (coincident with the renminbi’s October 2016 entry into the IMF’s SDR basket), not at zero before then.
Source: IMF, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER) World aggregate (G001), allocated reserves (AFXRA), quarterly. Recent quarters (through Q1 2026) are provisional and revise as late reporters submit. Methodology
The dollar’s share, told by the data
The US dollar’s share of allocated reserves was 71.19% in Q1 1999, the start of COFER’s modern currency taxonomy. It is 57.13% in Q1 2026, a change of −14.06 pp over the span. Its highest reading was 72.13% (Q2 1999) and its lowest was 56.42% (Q4 2025). The decline is gradual and partial, not a collapse: the dollar remains, by a wide margin, the single largest reserve currency. Over the same window the euro moved from 18.12% (Q1 1999) to 20.03%, peaking at 24.18% (Q3 2009); the renminbi entered at 1.00% (Q4 2016), peaked at 2.85% (Q4 2021), and is 1.99% now.
| Currency | First quarter | First share | Peak share | Latest share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USD US dollar | Q1 1999 | 71.19% | 72.13% (Q2 1999) | 57.13% |
| EUR Euro | Q1 1999 | 18.12% | 24.18% (Q3 2009) | 20.03% |
| JPY Japanese yen | Q1 1999 | 6.03% | 7.05% (Q3 2000) | 5.44% |
| GBP Pound sterling | Q1 1999 | 2.74% | 5.66% (Q4 2007) | 4.40% |
| CNY Chinese renminbi | Q4 2016 | 1.00% | 2.85% (Q4 2021) | 1.99% |
Source: IMF, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER) First / peak / latest computed directly from the quarterly share series for each currency. The renminbi's later first quarter is a real reporting-history fact, not a data gap. Methodology
Related: the equity-valuation and stress read on financial conditions. See the full methodology for the COFER dimensions, the five-currency subset limitation, and the recent-quarter revision caveat.