Guyana: Currency & Financial System

Guyana's currency has passed through several regional transitions. As British Guiana, the colony adopted the Spanish dollar as its unit of account in 1839, replacing the Dutch guilder inherited from earlier Dutch rule, and later circulated British West Indies dollar notes beginning in 1951. The East Caribbean dollar succeeded the British West Indies dollar in 1965, and after Guyana's independence in 1966, a new national currency, the Guyana dollar, replaced the East Caribbean dollar at par. The Bank of Guyana, established as the country's central bank, has issued the currency ever since.

As of 2026, Guyana's exchange rate operates under what the International Monetary Fund describes as a stabilized arrangement, with the currency having traded in a narrow band around 208 Guyana dollars to one United States dollar in recent years. The Bank of Guyana has kept monetary policy relatively tight to contain inflation, which rose from about 2 percent in 2023 toward roughly 4 percent by 2025, while the central bank also works to broaden its policy tools as the economy expands rapidly.

That expansion has been driven overwhelmingly by offshore oil production, which has reshaped Guyana's financial system. Oil revenues are channeled into the Natural Resource Fund, a sovereign wealth fund established under the Natural Resource Fund Act of 2019 and held at the Bank of Guyana; the fund had grown to roughly 3.1 billion US dollars, more than an eighth of GDP, by the end of 2024. Rapid credit growth and rising bank reserves have accompanied the boom, prompting international lenders to urge stronger oversight of lending risk as the financial sector scales up alongside the petroleum industry.