- Engravers hand-engrave soft steel plates with each component of the designs on a given bill. This will include the portrait, scrolls, lettering and more. The lines are not continuous, but made up of tiny short lines and dots. These come together to form a "master-die", which is subjected to tons of weight and high temperatures during the printing process.
- Printing a bill involves 65 distinct steps. There are a number of plates involved, as well as a wide variety of materials (different dyes and colored paper) that are placed strategically around the bill to prevent counterfeiting. Bills are printed on a high-speed press that prints over 10,000 sheets per hour, with each sheet consisting of 32 bills.
- Employees of the Bureau thoroughly examine each sheet of bills for defects. They cannot become legal tender if they are found to be defective. After the examination, final touches are added. These include numbering the bills, and "overprinting" in black ink.
- The Bureau prints millions of bills in each denomination every year. In 2009, the Bureau's printing presses turned out 26 million bills every day. According to the Bureau's statistics, 95 percent of the notes printed annually are to replace old bills being taken out of circulation.
- Counterfeiters in the U.S. and around the world try to produce convincing replicas of U.S. bills. To minimize the risks from counterfeiting, the Bureau frequently introduces new security measures and takes old and more easily counterfeited bills out of circulation. In the 1990s, U.S. dollars featured watermarks, color-changing inks, a security thread and micro-printing. In the 2000s, new bills were released with updated color schemes and symbols that are harder to counterfeit.
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