Stats › Currencies and commodities › Reserve currencies
What central banks hold
Central banks hold about 13.1 trillion dollars of foreign exchange reserves between them, and the IMF publishes what currencies those reserves are in, every quarter, for free. The database is called COFER and it is the only official answer to the question of what the world's reserve managers actually own.
It is also a database with a trapdoor in it, and in 2025 the IMF quietly changed where the trapdoor is. Until the third quarter of 2025 every share COFER published was a share of allocated reserves only, the ones where the reporting country told the IMF the currency. From 2025Q3 the IMF got rid of that distinction entirely and now allocates 100% of world reserves by imputing the missing bits. Every historical share back to 2000 was revised.
So this page gives you the current numbers, the peak, the trend, and then spends a good chunk of its length on what those numbers do and do not mean. Because if you are quoting a dollar share from before October 2025 next to one from after it, you are comparing two different things.
In 2026Q1 the US dollar was 57.13% of world official foreign exchange reserves, the euro 20.03%, the Japanese yen 5.44%, the renminbi 1.99% and other currencies 6.18%, out of a total of $13.10 trillion. That dollar share is up from 56.42% in 2025Q4, and the IMF says exchange rate valuation effects were about half the increase. The dollar's peak was around 72% in 2001. The largest single holder is China at $3,416.3bn at end June 2026, then Japan at $1,287.5bn of total reserve assets. From 2025Q3 the IMF eliminated the unallocated reserves category and revised the series back to 2000Q1, which pushed the euro's share down about 0.8 percentage points in mid-2025 against the old series.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 8 named sources, roughly 2450 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.