The Jamaican dollar

Who holds the right to issue money

The Bank of Jamaica Act came into force in October 1960, two years before independence, and made the central bank the only issuer of notes and coins on the island. Its first notes appeared on 1 May 1961 in 5 and 10 shillings, 1 and 5 pounds. Unlike the government notes before them, they carried no date.

Private banks issued the island's first notes. The Colonial Bank, working in Jamaica from May 1837, printed notes payable in British pounds, Spanish dollars and local currency, and the Bank of Nova Scotia issued its own from 1900. A Board of Commissioners of Currency put out government notes from 15 March 1920, in small denominations because silver coins of low value were scarce. The Bank's timeline records private commercial banks barred from issuing notes in 1954.

What the island counted in before the dollar

Spanish silver circulated for centuries after the British took the island in 1655. In 1758 the Assembly ordered Spanish coins counter-stamped with a GR, for the reigning George II, and fixed the dollar at 6 shillings and 8 pence. An Act of 1839 made British currency Jamaica's own from 31 December 1840.

Copper was the problem. Many Jamaicans refused copper and bronze coins, and consignments of British copper were shipped back out. The answer came in 1869: cupro-nickel pennies and halfpennies with the Jamaican coat of arms, which the Bank calls the first truly Jamaican coins. A farthing followed in 1880.

How the decimal dollar was designed

The House of Representatives approved a Select Committee's report on 30 January 1968. It recommended a decimal system built on the ten-shilling unit, with a dollar and a cent, and new coins as close as possible in size and weight to the old ones. The 10 cent coin matched the shilling and the 25 cent the half crown.

The monarch left the coins. The Jamaican coat of arms took the obverse and national symbols the reverse: the doctor bird on the 25 cent, the blue mahoe on the 20 cent, lignum vitae on the 10, a crocodile on the 5 and the ackee on the cent. The Royal Mint struck them. The notes, printed by Thomas De La Rue, carried national heroes: George William Gordon on the $10, Paul Bogle on the $2, Alexander Bustamante on the $1 and Marcus Garvey on the 50 cent note.

Why the notes kept turning into coins

One denomination after another crossed from paper to metal. The 50 cent note became a coin in 1976, the $1 in 1990, the $5 in 1994, the $10 in 1999 and the $20 in 2000, a bimetallic coin bearing Garvey. Larger notes came in at the top: $100 in 1986, $50 in 1988, $500 in 1994, $1,000 in 2000 and $5,000 in 2009. The cent had already become a twelve-sided aluminium coin in 1975.

A polymer series of $50, $100, $500, $1,000, $2,000 and $5,000 notes entered circulation on 15 June 2023, introducing the $2,000. The cotton notes it replaced were demonetised on 1 July 2025. Since 2011 the Bank has chosen its printers and mints by competitive tender instead of relying on De La Rue and the Royal Mint alone.