Aussie $100 vanishes

Banking Day staff
Relatively few $100 polymer Australian banknotes have been returned to the RBA for processing, the central bank admits in its Bulletin for September 2019.

$100 banknotes have been excluded from analysis of estimated banknote life, as "their expected life-span far exceeds the available data."

$36.8 billion in $100 notes are in nominal circulation, 45.5 per cent of the total stock by value.

The average life of old-series polymer banknotes increases as the denomination gets higher, RBA analyst Shane Aves found.

The life expectancies are:

•    a little over 5 years for the $5 and $10;
•    a little over 10 years for the $20; and
•    around 15 years for the $50.

This, Aves notes "is consistent with lower-denomination banknotes incurring higher wear through greater use for transactions".