Australian dollar
official currency of Australia; also officially used in Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu
The Australian dollar (sign: $; code: AUD; also abbreviated A$ or sometimes AU$ to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; and also referred to as the dollar or Aussie dollar) is the official currency and legal tender of Australia, including all of its external territories, and three independent sovereign Pacific Island states: Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu. In April 2025, it was the seventh most-traded currency in the foreign exchange market and as of Q1 2024 the sixth most-held reserve currency in global reserves.
The Australian dollar was introduced as a decimal currency on 14 February 1966 to replace the non-decimal Australian pound, with the conversion rate of two dollars to the pound (£A1 = A$2). Each dollar is subdivided into 100 cents. The $ symbol precedes the amount. On the introduction of the currency, the $ symbol was intended to have two strokes, but the version with one stroke has also always been acceptable.
In 2023, there were A$4.4 billion in coins and A$101.3 billion in notes of Australian currency in circulation, or around A$6,700 per person in Australia, which includes cash reserves held by the banking system and cash in circulation in other countries or held as a foreign exchange reserve.
Constitutional basis
Section 51(xii) of the Constitution of Australia gives the Commonwealth (federal) Parliament the power to legislate with respect to "currency, coinage, and legal tender". The states are not allowed to coin money, in accordance with section 115 which provides that "[a] State shall not coin money, nor make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts." Australian circulating coins are now produced at the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra.
History
Background
Before Federation in 1901, the six colonies that comprised Australia had separate currencies, all of which closely replicated the British currency system, and were usually exchangeable with each other on a one-to-one basis.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Australian dollar” is official currency of Australia; also officially used in Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Australian, dollar and official, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q259502. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2024, 1966 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Australian dollar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.