Philippine peso
official currency of the Philippines
The Philippine peso, also referred to by its Filipino name piso (Philippine English: PEH-saw, PEE-, plural pesos; Filipino: piso [ˈpisɔː, ˈpɪsɔː]; sign: ₱; code: PHP), is the official currency of the Philippines. It is subdivided into 100 sentimo, also called centavos.
The peso has the symbol "₱", introduced during American rule in place of the original peso sign "$" used throughout Spanish America. Alternative symbols used are "PHP", "PhP", "Php", or just "P".
The monetary policy of the Philippines is conducted by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), established on January 3, 1949, as its central bank. It produces the country's banknotes and coins at its Security Plant Complex, which is set to move to New Clark City in Capas, Tarlac.
History
The Philippine peso is derived from the Spanish peso or pieces of eight brought over in large quantities from Spanish America by the Manila galleons of the period from the 16th century to the 19th. From the same Spanish peso or dollar is derived the various pesos of Spanish America, the dollars of the US and Hong Kong, as well as the Chinese yuan and the Japanese yen.
Pre-colonial coinage
Pre-colonial trade between tribes of what is now the Philippines and with traders from the neighboring islands was conducted through barter. The inconvenience of barter, however, later led to the use of some objects as a medium of exchange.
“Philippine peso” enters the record as official currency of the Philippines. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Philippine, peso and official can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Philippine peso” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Philippine, peso and official provides the most credible route into that argument.
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 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17193. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1949.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Philippine peso” 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.