Is the world really de-dollarizing?
Central banks bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold a year from 2022 to 2024, Russia and China settle their trade in rubles and yuan, and the dollar index fell 10.7% in the first half of 2025. We measured the dollar's share in five roles.
Is the world de-dollarizing?
The claim is that the world is leaving the dollar, and its evidence is familiar. Central banks bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold a year from 2022 to 2024, and Russia says 99.1% of its payments with China now run in rubles and yuan (World Gold Council, 2026b; TASS, 2025). The ICE dollar index, which measures the dollar against six other currencies, fell 10.7% in the first half of 2025, its worst first half since at least 2000.
The dollar does several jobs at once, so we measured its share of each one with the data its official keepers publish. The IMF counts reserves, the BIS currency trading and lending, Swift payments and the ECB bonds and loans.
A share is the slice of one pool held in one currency. The dollar’s 56.7% of central-bank reserves means that of every $100 they hold in foreign currency, $56.70 is in dollars (IMF, 2026). At today’s size, one point of that share is worth about $132 billion. Every currency trade has two sides, so the BIS counts trades to 200%: a dollar share of 89% means the dollar is on one side of 89 trades in 100.
The claim holds only for reserves and bank loans. Since 2016 the dollar has lost about 8 points of its share in each, and it now makes up 56.7% of central-bank reserves and 50.6% of bank loans across borders (Fig. 1). Where money trades and settles, its share rose instead: the dollar is on one side of 89% of currency trades and carries 52% of the payments sent over Swift. It also gained in international bonds, where its share is 63%.
The dollar lost share where central banks hold money and banks lend it, and gained share where money trades and settles.
Change in the dollar's share of each role from 2016 to the latest data, in percentage points; payments from July 2023, after a break in Swift's series.
How we tested it
The test measures the dollar’s share in five roles, each from the institution that keeps the count. Reserves come from the IMF, currency trading and dollar lending abroad from the BIS, payments from Swift, and international bonds and bank loans from the ECB’s tables of BIS data. Those tables count as international only the bonds a borrower issues outside its home currency. Each figure is the latest release as of October 3, 2026, so the reserve shares include the IMF’s December 2025 revision, and the dollar index runs to October 2.
Each role is compared with 2016, the earliest year the reserve, trading, bond and loan series share, and “since 2016” runs from there to each series’ latest release. Swift’s series breaks between June and July 2023, so payments are compared from July 2023 only. Private foreign holdings of Treasuries are total foreign holdings less those of foreign official institutions, from the US Treasury’s TIC tables.
A reserve share can move without anyone selling, so we split every quarter’s change in two by revaluing the non-dollar holdings at the previous quarter-end’s exchange rates, from the Federal Reserve’s H.10 release. What remains at unchanged rates is the active move, which comes from changes in the holdings themselves, and the rest is the exchange rate.
For the dollar index, the test is whether it still answers to US yields. We measure that as the correlation between daily moves in the index and in the 10-year Treasury yield, by calendar year and over rolling 60-day windows. A correlation of 1 would mean the two always move together, and 0 that they move independently of each other.
Central banks hold fewer dollars every decade, and the 2025 drop was the exchange rate
Central banks hold $13.22 trillion of reserves in foreign currencies. Over 25 years the dollar’s share of that pool has fallen by about a fifth, from 71.4% at its 2001 peak to 56.7% in mid-2026 (Fig. 2; IMF, 2026). The low came at the end of 2025, at 56.5%. The euro is second with 20.6%, its highest share since 2014, and the yen and sterling hold about 5% each.
The dollar's share of world reserves has fallen by about a fifth since 2001.
Share of allocated foreign-exchange reserves held in dollars, quarterly, 2000 to the second quarter of 2026.
Part of any fall in that share is arithmetic. A central bank that holds the same euros while the euro rises against the dollar reports a smaller dollar share without selling anything. Taking the exchange rates out leaves most of the long fall standing: of the 14.7 points the dollar has lost since 2001, 13.2 are the active move and only 1.5 are exchange rates (Fig. 3). Since 2016 the active move, 8.2 points, accounts for the whole fall.
The 2025 drop is the opposite case. In the first half of 2025 the euro rose 13.7% against the dollar, and the dollar’s share of reserves fell 1.5 points. Exchange rates explain more than all of that drop: they took 2.2 points off the share, while the active move added 0.7 points back. The IMF reached the same reading for the second quarter, when the share would have fallen 0.12 points at constant exchange rates (Nephew and Gweder, 2025).
The long fall in the dollar's reserve share is active, and the 2025 drop is exchange rates.
Change in the dollar's share of reserves over four periods, in percentage points: the active move at unchanged exchange rates (red) and the part exchange rates explain (grey).
The active drift is slow and steady. Since 2016 it has taken a little under one point a year off the dollar’s share, 0.86 points on average, which is about $114 billion of reserves at today’s size. The 2025 headlines did not change that pace.
The money left for gold and smaller currencies, and the renminbi lost ground
From 2022 to 2024 central banks bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold a year, more than twice the 473 tonnes a year they averaged from 2010 to 2021 (Fig. 4; World Gold Council, 2026b). The buying has since slowed, to 863 tonnes in 2025. The first half of 2026 brought 345 tonnes, the weakest first half since 2022, as Turkey and Russia sold (World Gold Council, 2026c).
Central banks bought gold at more than twice their earlier pace from 2022 to 2024.
Net central-bank gold purchases, tonnes a year, 2010 to 2025, including the World Gold Council's estimate of unreported buying.
Poland and China did most of the buying. From the end of 2021 to mid-2026 each added about 400 tonnes, roughly three times as much as the next buyers, Turkey and India (World Gold Council, 2026d). Russia’s holdings, by the same count, fell by 19 tonnes. China’s central bank has reported 22 straight months of additions, which took its gold to 2,387 tonnes at the end of August 2026 (State Administration of Foreign Exchange, 2026).
Gold’s weight in reserves rose mostly because its price did. The ECB counts gold as 27% of the world’s official reserves at the end of 2025, more than US Treasuries at 22% (ECB, 2026a). At end-2023 gold prices, its share would have been 16%. Gold sits outside the IMF’s currency data, so none of this shows in the dollar’s 56.7%.
Among currencies, smaller ones took most of the share the dollar lost. Since 2016 the Australian and Canadian dollars, the Swiss franc, the renminbi and other currencies have gained 5.4 points of reserves between them, to 13.2%, about two-thirds of what the dollar gave up. The renminbi itself slipped from a peak of 2.9% at the end of 2021 to 2.1%, even though it now settles 28.7% of China’s own goods trade (People’s Bank of China, 2026).
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