King Charles III-featured UK banknotes will join circulation on Wednesday; however, they will initially be uncommon in regular transactions. In order to satisfy rising demand or replace outdated notes featuring Queen Elizabeth II, the Bank of England (BOE) announced that new notes would be released. This move comes as cash use drops.
Following King Charles’s lead in advocating for the environment, this gradual rollout will attempt to lessen the financial and ecological footprint.
The notes of Queen Elizabeth II will circulate alongside the new ones and continue to be prominent for a while. The BOE has stated that Charles notes will be issued “very gradually,” but has not yet announced a print run. The new polymer banknotes that were introduced in 2016 have a lifetime of over twenty years, with notes of five and ten pounds surviving at least five years and notes of twenty pounds perhaps lasting longer than that.
This is a “historic moment,” according to BOE Governor Andrew Bailey, as this is the first occasion that the sovereign on the notes has changed. There may be less demand for cash, but the Bank of England will continue to supply it as long as there is a need, with 4.6 billion notes still in circulation valued at £82 billion.
