Money · Updated with each release · Figures to July 2026
How much Money is there in the world?
About $152 trillion, at the broadest official count (2024) - roughly $18,700 for every person alive. Most of it has never been printed: it lives in bank accounts. Here's what counts as money, and where the total is heading.
It's one of those questions that sounds unanswerable, but it has an official answer: add up every country's "broad money" - the cash plus the bank balances that spend like cash - and the world held about $152 trillion of it in 2024. That's the World Bank's own count, and this page keeps it charted, along with the two questions hiding underneath: how much of it is real, foldable cash, and how fast the total grows.
So, what are we looking at, exactly?
"Money" has an official ladder of definitions, and it's simpler than it sounds. At the bottom is physical cash - notes and coins. Add everyday bank balances (the money your card spends) and you have what economists call narrow money. Add savings accounts and other deposits that can be turned into spending quickly, and you have broad money - the widest measure of what people and businesses can actually spend, and the one the chart above adds up across every country, in dollars. Economies keep it measured because the total tends to track the size of everything bought and sold: right now the world's broad money equals 136% of the world's yearly economic output - and the total has multiplied 8× since 1990.
How much of it is actual cash?
Surprisingly little - and the US, which publishes the freshest numbers, makes the point precisely. American notes and coins in circulation total $2,476 billion; the US money supply (M2, the broad measure) is $23.2tn. So cash is about 11% of American money - the other 89% exists only as entries in bank computers, created when banks make loans and deleted when loans are repaid. Nobody printed it, and nobody could: there isn't enough paper money in existence to pay everyone's bank balance out at once - which is why bank runs can happen, and why deposit insurance exists.
How much money is there per person?
Divide the world's broad money by everyone alive and you get about $18,700 each. The same sum for the United States alone comes to roughly $68,000 per person - money is spectacularly unevenly spread between countries, before you even reach the unevenness between people. Worth holding onto: this is money, not wealth. Houses, shares, pensions and gold are worth far more than $152 trillion - but they'd have to be sold for money first, and there's only the number above to go round.
All the world's money, shared between all 8.1 billion of us
$18,700 each
Is more money still being created?
Yes - the US money supply is 5.4% larger than a year ago. The chart below is the whole American record, month by month since 1959, and its shape explains a lot of arguments: money creation is normally steady and unremarkable, then occasionally it isn't - the fastest year on record is flagged on the chart, when the total jumped 27% in twelve months during the pandemic response. What that did or didn't do to inflation is one of the longest-running fights in economics, and our dollar page tracks the purchasing-power end of it.
$2,476bn in notes and coins, against $23.2tn of money in total. The rest is ledger entries - real, spendable, and entirely digital long before anyone said "digital currency".
Calculated from the two charts above$20tn then, $152tn now. Growing economies need growing money - the argument is only ever about how fast.
Calculated from the chart at the topWhat these charts can't tell you
Money is not wealth: this page counts spendable balances, not the value of houses, companies or pensions, which is several times larger. Countries define broad money slightly differently, and the world figure is the World Bank's ratio applied to world output, so treat it as a well-built estimate rather than an audit. The dollar valuation moves when exchange rates do, even if nobody creates a cent. And the per-person figure is an average - it says nothing about who holds it, which is a different page's question.
Further reading
All of our numbers come from live, free sources - the world figures from the World Bank's broad money, GDP and population series (openly licensed), and the US series from the Federal Reserve via FRED. Every figure on this page is calculated from them, and the page updates as they do.
If you want to dig deeper: what all this money actually buys is our dollar page, and what the US government owes against it is the national debt page - the two natural companions to this one.