Open data

What old Indian coins and notes actually sell for

8,391 sales recorded at 10 independent coin shops. Each is the price an item sold out at — the shop's listed price — not the asking price of something still for sale, and not a price guide's estimate. Nothing else in India publishes these for old money, so this page keeps them in the open for anyone to use.

The whole distribution

Money that is still in circulation

These are coins and notes you still find in a pocket. The right-hand figure is misleading on its own and should not be quoted without this sentence: nobody lists an ordinary note for sale, so a collector catalogue contains only the special ones — a fancy serial, a star replacement, an uncirculated bundle. The inflation is absence, not contamination. An ordinary note from your pocket is almost certainly worth its face value.

The top of the market

Things do sell for lakhs — mostly complete bundles, rare British India notes and graded pieces. And the highest figures are the least certain: each is the shop's listed price when the item left the shop, and an item can leave a shop without being bought — which is how even a current-issue coin can appear here at a fantastic listed price.

Is there an RBI price list for old coins? No.

The Reserve Bank publishes no price list for old coins or notes, and it does not buy or sell them. On 4 August 2021 it said that it “does not deal in such matters and never seeks charges/ commissions of any sort”, and that it has authorised nobody to collect charges on its behalf. A PDF or a video calling itself the “RBI price list” was made by somebody else — usually to make an inflated number look official. The list on this page is the opposite: what was actually paid at independent shops, with the dates. What the RBI actually says →

How this was collected

• A sale is counted when an item sells out at an independent coin shop — its listing goes or its stock falls — and the price is the shop's listed price at that moment. These are fixed-price shops, so that is ordinarily what the buyer paid; it is not an auction price. Items still for sale, price-guide estimates, and delisted items from our sister site coinbazzar.com are all excluded.
• Sales detected between 2026-07-19 and 2026-11-05. Those are the dates the sales were recorded, not the age of the items.
• Prices are whole rupees as the shop recorded them. Nothing is adjusted for condition, and no outlier is removed.
• Sources: 10 independent coin shops. Our sister site coinbazzar.com is not one of them, and its listings are never counted as sales.
• A per-item page is shown to search engines only where at least 8 sales from 2 or more separate shops agree closely enough to mean something. Most items do not qualify.

Using these figures

Free to quote, with a link back. If you are writing about the old-coin fraud and want a figure checked, or a number this page does not carry, write to us.

Take the numbers rather than retyping them: CSV · JSON · PDF (printed 2026-10-02) Same figures as this page, with the method and the sources in the file.