Thursday Terminology - Star Note

Relevant Portions of a $1.00 U.S. Star Note

The star note, more commonly known as a replacement note in the currency community, is a note that is produced to replace an existing note that contained an error during it's production.  The purpose of the star note is to replace a faulty existing note for accounting and economical  purposes.  Instead of reprinting the entire serial number from the faulty note, the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving has an entirely different serial number created solely for the purpose of replacing the faulty notes.  Notes containing errors found in the auditing phase of production are noted and then replaced with a star note.  For accounting purposes, it keeps track of the number of note produced for a given day/week/month/year, and for economical purposes, the note is reprinted with an entirely different serial number with a "star" at the end, instead of reprinting all of the different serial numbers that contained errors.  

The note that you see above is a star note from the 2003 A series, from the Atlanta, GA Federal Reserve Bank.  This one was printed during the 5th printing run for error notes and approximately 3,200,000 were printed during this run.  This makes this note not as rare as most others bearing the FXXXXXXXX* serial.  Despite it not being as rare as most others, finding a star note in your change is still pretty hard.  I have a collection of approximately 100 or so $1 star notes in my collection starting from 1988A series to the current series of notes.  I also have various other star notes in different denominations, but nothing noteworthy.  Happy Thursday!