Almost ten million people voted on what the next euro notes look like

Serguey Asael Shinder23 September 2026, 18:071 min read

The ECB announced on 23 September 2026 that almost ten million people took part in its survey on the new euro banknotes — the public consultation on the themes and designs for the next series.

What it means

Ten million responses is a number worth pausing on, because it is not the kind of number a central bank usually produces. Consultations on monetary policy strategy, on payment regulation, on supervisory frameworks attract responses in the hundreds or low thousands — from firms, associations and specialists. A design survey draws individuals, and individuals arrive in a different order of magnitude entirely.

That gap is the institutional fact underneath the story. Banknotes are the only part of a central bank most people ever touch. Interest rate decisions, collateral frameworks and supervisory reviews are consequential and abstract; a note in a pocket is neither. An institution that is otherwise reachable only through its publications gets, once a generation, a question that millions of people feel entitled to answer.

Which is also why the exercise is more than decoration. The ECB has spent years arguing that cash must remain available and usable alongside a digital euro, and that argument rests on public attachment to cash being real rather than asserted. A consultation turnout is a measurement of that attachment — an imperfect one, self-selected and unweighted, but a measurement.

📌 We are reporting a turnout figure, not a design outcome. The themes and their final artwork, the production timetable and the issue date are separate decisions, and none of them is announced here.