The currency of Argentina is the Argentine peso (ISO code ARS), written with the $ sign before the amount and divided into 100 centavos, although inflation has made the centavo useless in practice. It is issued by the Banco Central de la República Argentina (BCRA) and was introduced in 1992 as the peso convertible, replacing the austral at 10,000 australes to one peso. Because so many zeros have been removed over the decades, one peso of 1992 equals ten trillion pesos of the moneda nacional used until 1970. Its notes now run up to 20,000 pesos, and since 14 April 2025 it has floated inside a band agreed with the International Monetary Fund.
Mitre to Roca: the Founding Figures on the 1990s Notes
The first peso notes of 1992 came in values of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 pesos, all printed at the same 155 × 65 mm size. Until 2001 they carried the words "Convertibles de curso legal", a reminder that each peso was then backed by a US dollar in the central bank's reserves. The 1-peso note gave way to a coin in 1994. A redesigned series from 1997 gave each note one founding figure of the republic, and several of these designs are still in circulation in 2026:
- 2 pesos (blue): Bartolomé Mitre, president and historian, with the Museo Mitre on the back. Withdrawn on 30 April 2018 and replaced by a coin.
- 5 pesos (green): José de San Martín, with the monument to the Army of the Andes on the Cerro de la Gloria in Mendoza. Withdrawn on 29 February 2020.
- 10 pesos (brown): Manuel Belgrano, creator of the Argentine flag, with the National Flag Memorial in Rosario.
- 20 pesos (red): Juan Manuel de Rosas, with the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado on the Paraná River.
- 50 pesos (black): Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, president and author of Facundo (1845), with the Casa Rosada.
- 100 pesos (violet): Julio Argentino Roca, with Juan Manuel Blanes's painting of the Conquest of the Desert, the military campaign of the 1870s and 1880s that seized Patagonia from its Indigenous inhabitants, killing more than 1,000 Mapuche and displacing more than 15,000 people.
Eva Perón and the Malvinas: the Tenemos Patria Notes, 2012–2016
From 2012 the government began replacing some of these portraits. A 100-peso note showing Eva Perón entered circulation on 20 September 2012. Its design was based on a 5-peso note prepared after her death in 1952 but never issued, because the 1955 coup removed President Juan Perón. The reverse shows a goddess with young children, taken from the Ara Pacis in Rome.
A 50-peso note issued on 2 March 2015 put the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands on the front. The islands are a British Overseas Territory that Argentina claims as the Islas Malvinas, and the two countries fought over them in 1982. On the back are the gaucho Antonio Rivero, the Argentine Military Cemetery on the islands, the cruiser ARA General Belgrano and a dolphin gull. A new 10-peso Belgrano note of 4 April 2016 showed him beside Juana Azurduy, raising the new flag on the Paraná on 27 February 1812. The series went out under the name Tenemos Patria ("We have a homeland"), and each note had its own title, such as "Heroes of the Paraná" for the 20-peso Rosas note.
Guanaco to Hornero: the 2016 Native Fauna Series
In 2016 the BCRA dropped people altogether and launched a series of native animals, each paired on the back with the landscape it lives in. This was also the moment the top denomination finally rose above 100 pesos, which had been the largest note since 1992:
- 20 pesos (red, 3 October 2017): a guanaco; the Patagonian desert.
- 50 pesos (grey, 15 August 2018): an Andean condor; Aconcagua, at about 6,967 m the highest mountain outside Asia.
- 100 pesos (violet, 18 December 2018): a taruca, the north Andean deer; the Sierra de Famatina in La Rioja.
- 200 pesos (blue, 26 October 2016): a southern right whale; the Valdés Peninsula in Chubut.
- 500 pesos (green, 29 June 2016): a jaguar; the Yungas cloud forests of the north-west.
- 1,000 pesos (orange, 1 December 2017): a hornero, the ovenbird that builds oven-shaped mud nests; the Pampas.
A 5,000-peso design was shown on 16 May 2020 but not issued, a sign of how fast prices were rising. The animal notes remain legal tender alongside the later series.
Grierson, Carrillo, Remedios del Valle and Alberdi: the 2,000 to 20,000-Peso Notes
In May 2022 the central bank announced a series called Heroínas y héroes de nuestra historia ("Heroines and heroes of our history"). Its planned 100, 200 and 500-peso notes, which would have shown Eva Perón, Martín Miguel de Güemes with Juana Azurduy, and Belgrano with María Remedios del Valle, were cancelled. A 1,000-peso San Martín note with the Crossing of the Andes is listed from May 2022, and larger notes followed:
- 2,000 pesos: the physicians Cecilia Grierson, the first woman to receive a medical degree in Argentina, and Ramón Carrillo, the country's first Minister of Public Health (1949–1954), with the Malbrán Institute of microbiology on the back. It went into circulation on 22 May 2023, printed from the plates first made for the shelved 5,000-peso note and without a security thread.
- 10,000 pesos (May 2024): Manuel Belgrano and María Remedios del Valle, a pardo soldier of the independence wars remembered as the "Madre de la Patria", with troops swearing loyalty to the new flag in 1812.
- 20,000 pesos (November 2024): Juan Bautista Alberdi, whose ideas shaped the 1853 Constitution, with his birthplace on the back.
The central bank announced the two largest notes on 11 January 2024. By early 2024 the notes most used in shops were the 1,000, 2,000 and 10,000 pesos; the 10, 20 and 50-peso notes had stopped circulating, and 100 to 500-peso notes were rarely seen.
Centavos and Peso Coins That Shops Refuse
Coins tell the same story more quickly. The 1992 peso arrived with coins of 1, 5, 10, 25 and 50 centavos, followed by a 1-peso coin in 1994 and a 2-peso coin in 2010. The 1-centavo coin was last minted in 2001. A new series of 1 and 5-peso coins began in 2017, with 2 and 10 pesos following in 2018. These coins are still legal tender, but shops and bank branches do not accept them because they are worth so little and are awkward to store.
Some coins were made mainly to mark events. A 2-peso coin of 1999 marked the centenary of the writer Jorge Luis Borges, with a labyrinth and the Hebrew letter aleph on the reverse. Another, issued on 18 September 2002 for the 50th anniversary of Eva Perón's death, was meant to replace the 2-peso note if inflation continued. In 2010 a set of 1-peso coins for the bicentenary of the May Revolution showed places such as the Perito Moreno Glacier, Mount Aconcagua, Mar del Plata, the Pucará de Tilcara and El Palmar.
Banco Central de la República Argentina since 1935
The BCRA was created by six acts of Congress on 28 May 1935, replacing the currency board that had run since 1899. Its charter was drafted by the economist Raúl Prebisch, who was its general manager until 1943, and its first president was Ernesto Bosch (1935–1945). For its first decade it was a private entity in which British interests held a majority. Juan Perón nationalised it on 24 March 1946. Its headquarters stand on San Martín Street in the financial district of Buenos Aires, in an Italian Renaissance-style building designed in 1872 by Henry Hunt and Hans Schroeder for the Mortgage Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires and bought by the central bank in 1940.
From the 1991 Convertibility Law to the 2025 Currency Band
The peso was built to end a run of failed currencies. Argentina replaced the moneda nacional with the peso ley in 1970 at 100 to 1, the peso argentino in June 1983 at 10,000 to 1, and the austral in June 1985 at 1,000 to 1. Inflation reached about 5,000% in 1989, with prices rising 200% in July of that year alone. The Convertibility Law of 1 April 1991, introduced by economy minister Domingo Cavallo, tied the currency to the US dollar, and the peso that replaced the austral in 1992 started at one peso to one dollar. The fixed rate held for a decade but ended in the economic crisis of 2001; it was repealed in January 2002, and the peso fell to nearly 4 per dollar.
Exchange controls introduced at the end of 2011 created a parallel "blue dollar" market. President Mauricio Macri removed the restrictions in December 2015, but the official rate kept sliding: 14.4 per dollar on 1 April 2016 and 131.22 on 29 July 2022, when the unofficial rate was 298. After the official rate was fixed at 350 on 14 August 2023, economy minister Luis Caputo devalued it from 366.5 to 800 per dollar, a cut of 54%, on 12 December 2023, under the new president Javier Milei. A crawling devaluation of 2% a month followed, cut to 1% in February 2025. Annual inflation reached 289.4% in April 2024, the highest since the current peso was introduced. From 14 April 2025 the peso has moved freely inside a band of 1,000 to 1,400 per dollar under an IMF agreement. When the rate pushed through the upper limit in September and October 2025, the central bank and the US Treasury both bought pesos to defend the band.
Read the notes in order and you can follow the inflation: the largest note was 100 pesos for 24 years, then 500 in 2016, 1,000 in 2017 and 20,000 by 2024. For the wider picture behind those numbers, see our guide to the economy of Argentina; for more on the people printed on the money, read about notable Argentines across history; and to compare the neighbouring currency, see the currency of Brazil.