Why are old currency codes still listed by ISO 4217?

ISO 4217 keeps withdrawn codes on a reserved list so historic transactions, archives and ledgers remain unambiguous. The code is retired from active use but never silently reassigned to a different currency.

What replaced the Deutsche Mark and French Franc?

Both were replaced by the euro (EUR) when euro banknotes and coins entered circulation on 1 January 2002. Their DEM and FRF codes were withdrawn at that point but remain valid for historic reference.

When did Croatia switch to the euro?

Croatia adopted the euro on 1 January 2023, withdrawing the kuna (HRK). It is the most recent eurozone accession and the newest code on this list.

What is the ECU code XEU?

XEU was the European Currency Unit, a basket-based accounting unit used by the EU before the euro. It was replaced one-for-one by the euro (EUR) on 1 January 1999 when the euro became the official accounting currency.

Does this tool connect to the internet?

No. The full table is bundled with the page and all searching happens in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, logged or stored.

What is the Historic Currency Code Reference?

Searchable reference of retired ISO 4217 currency codes — the German Mark, French Franc, Greek Drachma and more — with numeric code, country, withdrawal year and the currency that replaced each one. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Historic Currency Code Reference

Name: Historic Currency Code Reference
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Currency codes that are no longer in use

When a country adopts a new currency or joins the euro, its old ISO 4217 code is withdrawn from active circulation. This reference lists those retired alphabetic and numeric codes alongside the entity, the year the code left circulation, and the currency that replaced it — from the wave of legacy currencies absorbed by the euro to redenominations like the old and new Turkish lira.

How it works

ISO 4217 assigns every active currency a three-letter alphabetic code (the first two letters usually match the country’s ISO 3166 code, the third names the currency) and a three-digit numeric code. When a currency ceases circulation, the standard moves its codes to a list of withdrawn codes:

DEM  276  German Mark      withdrawn 2002  ->  EUR
TRL  792  Turkish Lira old withdrawn 2005  ->  TRY
HRK  191  Croatian Kuna    withdrawn 2023  ->  EUR

The retired code is reserved rather than reused, so a value labelled DEM in an old record can never be confused with a present-day currency. The table is searchable by code, currency name, country or the successor currency code.

Why withdrawn codes matter for developers and analysts

A common trap when working with financial data is assuming all ISO 4217 codes in a dataset are currently active. Historic transaction exports, accounting archives, and legacy ledgers routinely contain retired codes. If your system validates against only the live currency list, records labelled DEM, FRF, or ATS will fail — even though they represent perfectly valid historical transactions.

Equally, an analytics pipeline joining exchange-rate data from a provider that strips withdrawn codes against a transaction database that includes them will produce silent join failures, dropping historic records without any error. This reference helps you identify which codes are historic and what they mapped to.

The euro wave: original twelve members (2002)

When euro banknotes and coins entered circulation on 1 January 2002, twelve currencies were simultaneously replaced:

Code	Currency	Country
ATS	Austrian Schilling	Austria
BEF	Belgian Franc	Belgium
DEM	Deutsche Mark	Germany
ESP	Spanish Peseta	Spain
FIM	Finnish Markka	Finland
FRF	French Franc	France
GRD	Greek Drachma	Greece
IEP	Irish Pound	Ireland
ITL	Italian Lira	Italy
LUF	Luxembourg Franc	Luxembourg
NLG	Dutch Guilder / Florin	Netherlands
PTE	Portuguese Escudo	Portugal

All were replaced at irrevocably fixed exchange rates and their codes withdrawn simultaneously.

Notable redenominations and non-euro withdrawals

Not all withdrawn codes are euro-related. Some currencies were replaced through redenominations — where a country issued a new currency at a fixed ratio to the old one, usually to remove zeros after inflation:

TRL → TRY (2005): Turkey redenominated its lira at 1,000,000 old lira = 1 new lira. The old code TRL was withdrawn and TRY introduced.
ROL → RON (2005): Romania redenominated its leu at 10,000 old leu = 1 new leu.
RSD → RSD (Serbia): the Serbian dinar has had several predecessor codes through the political transitions of the former Yugoslavia.

Tips and notes

Euro adoption is staggered: Slovenia (2007), Cyprus and Malta (2008), Slovakia (2009), Estonia (2011), Latvia (2014), Lithuania (2015), and Croatia (2023).
A redenomination gets a brand-new code, not a revived old one.
Numeric codes are useful when systems must stay language-neutral or when the alphabetic code has been reassigned across redenominations.
For currently active codes, see the live ISO 4217 currency reference.