While POS terminals are in use in Iran, the country does not participate in any of the major international card networks due to sanctions between it and the United States.

[19] As of 2024, the Iranian rial is the world’s least valuable currency, worth less than the Sierra Leonean leone or the Laotian Kip.

Prior to decimalisation in 1932, these coins and currencies were used, and some of these terms still have wide usage in Iranian languages and proverbs:[21] In 1932, the rial was pegged to sterling at a rate of £1 = Rls 59.75.

Injecting sudden foreign exchange revenues in the economic system forms the phenomenon of "Dutch disease" in a country.

[27] Although described as an (interbank) "market rate", the value of the Iranian rial is tightly controlled by the central bank.

The central bank has allowed the rial to weaken in nominal terms (4.6% on average in 2009) in order to support the competitiveness of non-oil exports.

[28] However, the spread increased again in September 2010 because channels for transferring foreign currency to and from Iran being blocked because of international sanctions.

[29][30] Monetary policy is facilitated by a network of 50 Iranian-run forex dealers in Iran, the rest of the Middle East and Europe.

Reason cited by analysts is the fact that the government has been printing money in excess of the economic growth.

[38] The Rial's value has dropped by 29% since the nationwide protests that began on September 16, 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22 year old Kurdish-Iranian woman in police custody.

The "official rate" applied to oil and gas export receipts, imports of essential goods and services, and repayment of external debt.

The "export rate", fixed at Rls 3,000 per dollar since May 1995, applied to all other trade transactions, but mainly to capital goods imports of public enterprises.

[28] In 1998, in order to ease pressure on exporters, the central bank introduced a currency certificate system allowing exporters to trade certificates for hard currency on the Tehran Stock Exchange, thus creating a floating value for the rial known as the "TSE rate" or "market rate".

[48] Iran's Central Bank channels more than 90 per cent of hard currency into the local market (2012).

[49][50] This project was cancelled following the strong depreciation of the rial between 2012 and 2013 but was put on the agenda again in 2015 for use in the reunification of forex rates (planned for 2017) and the introduction of currency derivatives.

[52] In 2010, the cases of multiple currency practices arose from the following:[52] Until 2012, the dollar had different exchange rates, depending on where you are buying your currency[53] In 2012, Bank Markazi classified a long list of goods into categories with priorities 1 through 10, leaving it to the parallel market to take of all other needs.

[54] Because of the current low value of rial, and that people rarely use the term, redenomination or change of currency has been proposed a number of times since the late 1980s.

Opponents of redenomination are wary of more inflation resulting from psychological effects, and increase in velocity of money leading to more instabilities in the economy of Iran.

[55][56] On April 12, 2007, the Economics Commission of the Parliament announced initiation of a statute in draft to change the currency, claiming redenominations had helped reduce inflation elsewhere, such as in Turkey.

[59] In 2010, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iran would remove three zeros (not the four that had been proposed) from its national currency as part of the economic reform plan.

[67] In 2013, talking about the sanctions against Iran, US Senator Carl Levin said that "Iranian Rial banknotes are printed in Europe".

Due to a shortage of paper currency, higher denominations have been issued as cheques rather than legal tender banknotes.

[93][94] The note features a quote by the prophet Mohammed, translated as: "Even if knowledge is at the Pleiades, the people from the land of Persia would attain it".

Currently the highest valued legal tender banknote issued by the central bank is Rls 100,000 (about US$2.4 on Aug. 22, 2023).