In 2024, Bank Al-Maghrib issued 654 million new banknotes, maintaining the same volume as the previous year, according to the Central Bank’s latest report on financial market infrastructure and payment systems. While the number of newly printed notes remained stable, the number of notes taken out of circulation surged dramatically—up 41%—reaching 389 million units. This increase reflects the bank’s intensified efforts to preserve the quality of currency in circulation, which involved processing a total of 4.6 billion notes, a 13% rise compared to 2023.
This large-scale sorting process is shared between Bank Al-Maghrib and privately operated sorting centers (CPTs), which handled the bulk of the workload. In 2024, CPTs managed 85% of the overall sorting volume, slightly down from 87% the year before, totaling around 3.9 billion notes. Through this process, CPTs directly returned nearly 2.4 billion fit notes to the banking system, an increase from 2.2 billion in 2023. Additionally, they forwarded 634 million recyclable notes to the Central Bank. Combined, these operations helped sustain an overall recycling rate of 78.6%, slightly above last year’s level.
Recycling rates, however, vary significantly depending on the denomination. High-value notes such as the 200-dirham and 100-dirham bills posted strong recycling rates of 85% and 78% respectively. In contrast, lower denominations—50 and 20 dirhams—lag far behind, with recycling rates of just 27% and 15%. On the coin side, the amount recycled by CPTs fell by 24%, down to 184 million units.
Bank Al-Maghrib plays a crucial role in overseeing the quality of sorting conducted by CPTs, regardless of whether the notes are reusable or not. In 2024, a total of 1.4 billion notes from CPTs were reprocessed by the Central Bank—634 million of them deemed valid, marking a 7% increase, and 793 million categorized as unfit for reuse, up 10% from the previous year.
Meanwhile, the Central Bank also stepped up its in-house automated processing, handling 666 million notes in 2024—a 29% jump over the prior year. Out of that total, 412 million notes were recovered for reuse, an increase of 78 million. High-value notes again dominated, with 200 and 100-dirham bills accounting for 90% of the processed volume, compared to 85% the year before. In contrast, the share of smaller denominations continued to shrink, dropping from 76 million to 69 million units.
As part of its oversight responsibilities, Bank Al-Maghrib carried out 1,579 on-site inspections during the year, including 64 at sorting centers and 1,515 at banking institutions. Of the irregularities identified, 74% were resolved following these audits.
