Iranian rial

The rial and Rls is the official currency of Iran. It is subdivided into 100 dinars, but due to the rial's low purchasing power, the dinar is not practically used.
Although there is no official symbol for the currency, the Iranian standard ISIRI 820 defined a symbol for use on typewriters, and the two Iranian standards ISIRI 2900 and ISIRI 3342 define a character code to be used for it. The Unicode Standard also has a compatibility character defined.

History

The rial was first introduced in 1798 as a coin worth 1,250 dinars or one-eighth of a toman. In 1825, the rial ceased to be issued, with the qiran subdivided into 20 shahi or 1,000 dinars and was worth one-tenth of a toman, being issued as part of a decimal system. The rial replaced the qiran at par in 1932, subdivided into 100 new dinars.
Prior to decimalisation in 1932, these coins and currencies were used, and some of these terms still have wide usage in Iranian languages and proverbs:

Old currency	Value	First Issue
Dinar	-	Umayyad Caliphate
Shahi	10 Dinars	Iranian Intermezzo
Abbasi	100 Dinars	Safavid Iran
Naderi	1,000 Dinars	Afsharid Iran
Rial	10,000 Dinars	Zand dynasty
Qiran	100,000 Dinars	Early Qajar Iran
Toman	1,000,000 Dinars	Late Qajar Iran

Exchange rate

In 1932, the rial was pegged to sterling at a rate of £1 = Rls 59.75. The exchange rate was £1 = Rls 80.25 in 1936, £1 = Rls 64.350 in 1939, £1 = Rls 68.8 in 1940, £1 = Rls 141 in 1941 and £1 = Rls 129 in 1942. In 1945, the rial was pegged to the U.S. dollar at USD 1 = Rls 32.25. The rate was US$1 = Rls 75.75 in 1957. Iran did not follow the dollar's currency devaluation in 1973, leading to a new peg of USD 1 = Rls 68.725. The dollar peg was dropped in 1975.
In 1979, 70 Rls equalled one U.S. dollar. The value of the rial declined precipitously after the Islamic Revolution because of capital flight from the country. A study estimated that the capital flight from Iran shortly before and after the revolution in the range of $30 to $40 billion. Whereas on March 15, 1978, Rls 71.46 equalled $1, in July 1999, $1 equalled Rls 9,430.
Injecting sudden foreign exchange revenues in the economic system forms the phenomenon of "Dutch disease" in a country. There are two main consequences for a country with Dutch disease: loss of price competitiveness in its production goods, and hence the exports of those goods; and an increase in imports. Both cases were clearly visible in Iran.
Although described as an "market rate", the value of the Iranian rial is tightly controlled by the central bank. The state ownership of oil export earnings and its large reserves, supervision of letters of credit, together with current – and capital outflow account – outflows allows management of demand. The central bank has allowed the rial to weaken in nominal terms in order to support the competitiveness of non-oil exports.
There is an active black market in foreign exchange, but the development of the TSE rate and the ready availability of foreign exchange during 2000 narrowed the differential to as little as IR100 in mid-2000. However, the spread increased again in September 2010 because channels for transferring foreign currency to and from Iran being blocked because of international sanctions.
Monetary policy is facilitated by a network of 50 Iranian-run forex dealers in Iran, the rest of the Middle East and Europe. According to the Wall Street Journal and dealers, the Iranian government was selling US$250 million daily to keep the rial exchange rate against the US dollar between Rls 9,700 and Rls 9,900 in 2009. At times the authorities weakened the national currency intentionally by withholding the supply of hard currency to earn more rial-denominated income, usually at times when the government faced a budget deficit.
The widening of the gap between official and unofficial exchange rates stood at over 20% in November 2011. This shows the correlation between the value of foreign currencies and the domestic inflationary environment.
The unofficial rial to US dollar rate underwent severe fluctuations in January 2012, eventually settling at Rls 17,000 at the end of the period. Besides all the bad effects on the economy in general, this had the effect of boosting the competitiveness of Iran's domestic industries abroad. Following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's decision to liberalize the mechanism by which bank interest rates are set, CBI announced that it would be fixing the official rate of the rial against the dollar at Rls 12,260 from January 28, 2012, and seek to meet all demand for foreign currency through banks.
By June 2020, the Iranian rial had fallen nearly five-fold since the beginning of 2018, contributing to the record inflation. Reason cited by analysts is the fact that the government has been printing money in excess of the economic growth.
The rial's exchange rate dropped by 29% after the nationwide protests that began on September 16, 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22 year old Kurdish-Iranian woman in police custody. Following the regional tension towards the end of 2024, the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, Donald Trump winning the US presidential election and ongoing economic factors brought the rial to its lowest value at the end of 2024, 820,500 to 1 US dollar.
The rial exchange rate started 2025 at 817,500 rials to the US dollar, and declined all year with annualized inflation rate never lower than 36.4%, rising to 42% late in the year. The exchange rate dropped all year, including following the government of Israel making air strikes on Iran in June.
In December 2025, the rial dropped to a record low of 1.42 million rials to the US dollar, resulting in the resignation of the Governor of the Central Bank of Iran Mohammad Reza Farzin on 29 December 2025, who took office in December 2022 with the rial trading at 430,000 to the dollar. The collapse in the exchange rate was one of the causes of the 2025–2026 Iranian protests.

Year	Official rate	Transfer/business/trade/parallel/free rate
2003	8,193	8,193
2004	8,885	8,885
2005	8,964	8,964
2006	9,227	9,227
2007	9,408	9,408
2008	9,143	9,143
2009	9,900	9,900
2010	10,308	10,308
2011	10,800	13,568
2012	12,175.5	26,059
2013	18,517.2	31,839
2014	25,780.2	32,385
2017	33,127	59,500
2018	42,000	135,000
2019	42,000	129,500
2020	42,000	253,940
2021	42,000	273,080
2022	41,850	427,000
2024	767,550	767,550
2025	1.42 million

Pre-unification, rials per US dollar:

Market: 8,200 ; 8,050 ; 8,350
Preferred: 6,906 ; 1,753 ; 1,764
Current market exchange rates

Exchange rate system

Until 2002, Iran's exchange rate system was based on a multi-layered system, where state and para-state enterprises benefited from the "preferred or official rate" while the private sector paid the "market rate", hence creating an unequal competition environment. The "official rate" applied to oil and gas export receipts, imports of essential goods and services, and repayment of external debt. The "export rate", fixed at Rls 3,000 per dollar since May 1995, applied to all other trade transactions, but mainly to capital goods imports of public enterprises.
In 1998, in order to ease pressure on exporters, the central bank introduced a currency certificate system allowing exporters to trade certificates for hard currency on the Tehran Stock Exchange, thus creating a floating value for the rial known as the "TSE rate" or "market rate". This method finally replaced the fixed "export rate" in March 2000, and has since held steady at some Rls 8,500:US$1.
In March 2002, the multi-tiered system was replaced by a unified, market-driven exchange rate. In 2002 the "official rate" a/k/a "preferred rate" was abolished, and the TSE rate became the basis for the new unified foreign-exchange regime. Iran's Central Bank channels more than 90 per cent of hard currency into the local market.

Forex bourse

In a move interpreted as aiming at unifying currency exchange rates, on September 24, 2012, the government launched a foreign exchange centre, that would provide importers of some basic goods with foreign exchanges, at a rate about 2% cheaper than the open market rate on a given day. This project was cancelled following the strong depreciation of the rial between 2012 and 2013 but was put on the agenda again in 2015 for use in the reunification of forex rates and the introduction of currency derivatives. through the Iran Mercantile Exchange.
In addition to banks, exchange shops are also available for limited transactions. Exchange shops must operate under the licenses issued by Central Bank of Iran. Foreign currencies can be bought or sold at these exchange shops.

Exchange restriction

Exchange restriction arises from limitations on the transferability of rial profits
from certain investments under the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Act and from limitations on other investment-related current international payments under this act.