500 000 Rials

Iran's shift to issuing 500,000-rial notes reflects the cumulative damage of decades of inflation driven by international sanctions, oil revenue volatility, and domestic monetary expansion — by the time this denomination appeared, the 500,000 rial was worth roughly $15 USD at open-market rates, not an extravagant sum. The denomination gap it filled had been a practical problem for daily transactions for years.

The Central Bank had been under sustained pressure during this period due to the 2012 sanctions escalation, which severely restricted Iran's access to international banking and printing supply chains. Security feature procurement for new issues became notably more constrained from that point forward.