Governments keep an emergency stack of somebody else’s money. Together they hold about of it — dollars, euros, yen, pounds, renminbi, Swiss francs and a great deal of gold. Click any country to open its vault.
The map
Who holds the most of each currency
Estimated holdings, in US$ billions. Pick a currency; click a bar to open that country on the map.
Most concentrated in it
Share of the country’s own reserve portfolio, among governments holding more than $5bn in total. Identical values mean the countries share a modelled peer group.
The global vault
All 165 governments’ reserves combined, set against the IMF’s own survey.
Every region keeps a different mix
Composition of total reserve assets by region, as a share of each region’s own total.
Gold versus paper
Total reserves against the share held as gold. Bubble area is total reserves. At $ an ounce, gold has quietly become the largest single line in a lot of Western vaults.
All the numbers
Click a column heading to sort. Values in US$ billions.
Where these numbers come from
Total reserve assets = foreign exchange reserves excluding gold, plus official gold holdings valued at $ a troy ounce. Headline reserve figures are the latest available for 2026 from national central banks via Trading Economics, the CIA World Factbook and IMF releases; gold tonnages are the World Gold Council series.
The currency splits are estimates, and that is unavoidable. Only a minority of central banks publish the currency composition of their own reserves. Countries marked Disclosed use published or officially-derived shares — the Swiss National Bank’s quarterly allocation, the ECB’s International Role of the Euro annex (euro shares for Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czechia, Denmark, Georgia, Israel, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US), and central-bank annual reports.
Everyone else is modelled in two steps. First the country is assigned to a peer group — dollar-pegged, euro-orbit, euro-area, emerging Asia, Latin America, CFA franc zone, Commonwealth, Africa, or the global average — which gives it a starting profile. Then every modelled portfolio is raked (iterative proportional fitting) until the combined holdings of all COFER-reporting countries reproduce the IMF’s published shares for exactly, holding the disclosed countries fixed. China sits outside that calibration because it does not report its composition; Japan’s and China’s own splits are widely-cited estimates rather than disclosures, so they are seeded and then raked like everyone else. Treat any unmarked country split as an informed approximation, not a reported fact.
A currency is never counted as a reserve asset of its own issuer. That is why the euro is missing from euro-area vaults — the euro is not a foreign currency for the Bundesbank — and why Switzerland holds no francs.
Reserves are not sovereign wealth. Norway’s oil fund, Singapore’s GIC and the Gulf’s sovereign wealth funds sit outside these figures entirely. Roughly $300bn of Russia’s reserves has been frozen abroad since 2022 but is still reported as held.
Sources: IMF COFER · Trading Economics · World Gold Council · European Central Bank · Swiss National Bank · CIA World Factbook. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.