What Is the Only US State Where Paper Money Is Printed? Inside the Fort Worth Facility That Makes Every Federal Reserve Note

The only US state where paper money is printed is Texas. Since December 1990, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's Western Currency Facility in Fort Worth has produced Federal Reserve notes, and today it shares domestic note production with the bureau's original Washington, DC plant — which sits in the District of Columbia, not a state. Every other state's "paper money" is either coins, private banknotes from the pre-1863 era, or currency printed elsewhere and shipped in.

That answer sounds trivial until you dig into what "printed," "paper money," and "state" each actually mean here. The keyword question hides three separate ambiguities, and resolving them explains why the answer is Texas rather than, say, Massachusetts (where American paper currency was effectively invented) or New York (where the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stores the most gold). This explainer walks through the mechanism of note production, the quantified scale of the Fort Worth operation, the edge cases that trip people up, and the misconceptions that keep the wrong answers circulating.

How Federal Reserve Notes Are Actually Manufactured

A US banknote is not printed so much as assembled from two independent printing processes, and understanding that split is the key to why the government describes notes as "manufactured" rather than printed. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP), an agency within the Department of the Treasury, runs both processes at both of its facilities.

The first pass is offset printing, which lays down the background color and the fine, repeating patterns called guilloche that make notes hard to counterfeit. The second pass is intaglio printing, where engraved steel plates press ink into the paper under enormous pressure — roughly 10 to 20 tons per square inch in the intaglio stage — creating the raised texture you can feel on a genuine note's portrait and numerals. Intaglio is why counterfeiters with commercial printers still fail: the tactile relief is a physical signature that a flat offset or digital print cannot reproduce.

The substrate is not ordinary paper. It is a cotton-linen blend — roughly 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen — with no wood pulp, which gives notes their distinctive snap and durability. Red and blue security fibers are embedded in the furnish during papermaking, and since the 2003 series the BEP has added color-shifting ink, watermarks, and 3-D security ribbons to higher denominations. A modern USD 100 note carries a blue 3-D ribbon woven into the paper that appears to move as you tilt it.

Here is the counterintuitive detail most thin explainers miss: the Fort Worth facility does not make the paper. Banknote paper is manufactured by a private contractor, Crane Currency, at a mill in Dalton, Massachusetts, and shipped to both printing sites. So Massachusetts is deeply embedded in US paper money — it just makes the raw material rather than printing the finished note. That distinction is exactly the kind of thing the keyword question is testing.

The Scale of Fort Worth Note Production, in Numbers

The Western Currency Facility opened in Fort Worth in 1990 and began full production in 1991, giving the BEP a second site deliberately located away from Washington to reduce single-point-of-failure risk and to serve the western half of the country. The facility occupies roughly 750,000 square feet on a 78-acre campus and employs well over 1,000 people at peak production.

The BEP does not publish a facility-by-facility split every year, but its overall production volume gives the context. In a typical recent fiscal year the bureau produces on the order of 7 billion to 9 billion notes across both plants, with the Fort Worth facility historically accounting for something in the range of 40 to 50 percent of domestic note output. Treat those percentages as approximate — the BEP's published annual reports give total note volumes and congressional justifications give capacity figures, but the per-facility split moves with demand and is not always broken out.

What is more stable and more useful is the production rate. The Fort Worth facility's intaglio presses can print sheets at high speed, and the BEP has described daily output in the millions of notes per facility on full production days. A single sheet of currency paper holds 32 or 50 notes depending on denomination and series layout, and each sheet passes through multiple inspection stations where defects are pulled. The inspection burden is substantial — the BEP rejects a meaningful fraction of sheets for print defects, registration errors, and paper flaws, and those rejects are destroyed and recycled rather than released.

For scale comparison, the total value of US currency in circulation exceeds USD 2 trillion, and the BEP's production is replacement-driven: notes wear out, are removed by Federal Reserve Banks, and are shredded. The average life of a USD 1 note in circulation is roughly 6 to 7 years; a USD 100 note lasts far longer because it circulates less. Fort Worth's output is therefore best understood as a continuous replenishment stream, not a stockpile.

The table makes the structural point explicit: the two facilities are functionally parallel. Neither is a "backup" for the other in normal operation; both run as primary production sites, which is why the honest answer to the keyword is "Texas, because the other plant is not in a state at all."

Edge Cases That Complicate the Simple Answer

Three edge cases deserve explicit reconciliation, because each one generates a different wrong answer.

First, the District of Columbia. The BEP's main facility is at 14th and C Streets SW in Washington. DC is a federal district, not a state, and it has no voting representation in Congress. So the Washington plant prints paper money but is not in a state. If the question were "which state and which non-state location print US paper money," the answer would be Texas and DC together.

Second, historical state printing. Before the National Banking Act of 1863 and the subsequent tax on state banknotes, private banks in many states issued their own paper currency. Those notes were printed in states including New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. They are collector items today, not legal tender, and they do not count as current US paper money production. The keyword question is present tense, so historical state banknote printing is out of scope — but it is the single most common source of confident wrong answers.

Third, the meaning of "paper money." The US Mint, which produces coins, operates facilities in Philadelphia, Denver, San Francisco, and West Point. None of those produce paper currency. If someone interprets "paper money" loosely to include the paper stock or the security thread, they may point to Massachusetts (paper) or to a thread supplier, but neither is printing money. The thread and security features are supplied by contractors and incorporated at the printing facilities.

There is also a semantic trap in "printed." The BEP itself prefers "manufactured" because a note involves papermaking, offset printing, intaglio printing, overprinting of the Federal Reserve seal and serial numbers, cutting, and packaging. If you define "printed" narrowly as the intaglio pass only, both facilities qualify. If you define it as the whole process, both facilities qualify. Either way, Texas is the only state in the set.

Misconceptions Worth Correcting

The most persistent misconception is that New York prints money because the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is the system's operational hub. The New York Fed stores gold, conducts open market operations, and hosts the foreign exchange desk, but it does not print notes. It orders them from the BEP through the Federal Reserve System's cash offices and distributes them. Confusing custody and storage with production is the error.

A second misconception is that the Federal Reserve prints money. The Fed does not print currency; it issues notes produced by the Treasury's BEP and pays the BEP for production costs. The Fed's role is monetary policy and distribution, and the mechanical act of printing sits with the Treasury. This split matters because it explains why "the Fed prints money" is a metaphor for money creation through lending and asset purchases, not a literal description of a printing press.

A third misconception is that Fort Worth prints only a subset of denominations. In practice both BEP facilities are equipped to produce the full range of current denominations, though production scheduling allocates specific denominations and series to specific plants to balance workload and security. A visitor touring Fort Worth may see USD 20 notes on one day and USD 100 notes on another.

A fourth, subtler misconception concerns the "printing" of the USD 100 note's blue ribbon. The ribbon is not printed on the surface; it is woven into the paper during manufacture in Dalton, Massachusetts, then the printing passes register around it. People who learn this sometimes conclude Massachusetts "prints" the security feature, which overstates the case — it manufactures the substrate that carries the feature.

Treat "the Fed prints money" as monetary economics shorthand, never as a description of a physical press. Do not count pre-1863 state banknotes as current US paper money production. Do not treat the District of Columbia as a state when answering state-specific questions. Do not confuse the paper mill in Dalton, Massachusetts with a printing facility. Do not assume a single plant handles all denominations; scheduling is allocated across both.

Practical Verification: How to Confirm the Answer Yourself

If you want to verify the claim rather than take it on faith, there are concrete steps. Each one produces a checkable artifact, and together they close the loop on every ambiguity in the keyword question.

First, consult the BEP's own facility pages and its annual reports. The bureau publishes production totals, facility descriptions, and tour information, and the Fort Worth facility is described as a production site in Treasury materials. Second, check the note itself: since 1990 the BEP has printed a small facility indicator on the face of notes — a "FW" prefix appears in the serial number or the note carries a Fort Worth production mark depending on series and denomination. Collectors use these markers to attribute notes to a plant. Third, examine the paper: notes carry red and blue fibers and, on newer series, a watermark and security ribbon that are consistent across both plants because the substrate comes from the same mill.

A practical threshold for the "FW" marker is worth stating carefully: the facility designation appears as part of the serial-number prefix or as a small letter adjacent to the plate number on many notes, and its exact form has changed across series. Do not over-claim a single rule. The reliable check is to look up the specific series and denomination in numismatic references or the BEP's published guidance rather than to assume every note carries an obvious state label.

If you are researching for a school project or a trivia answer, the cleanest formulation is: paper money is printed in Texas and in the District of Columbia, and Texas is the only one of those two that is a state. That sentence is defensible against every edge case above and takes about 20 seconds to say.

Limits of the Claim and What Changes Over Time

The answer is stable in its core mechanism but not frozen in every detail. Printing facilities can be expanded, retooled, or have their production roles rebalanced; the BEP has studied and at times proposed changes to its facility footprint, and any future consolidation could alter which plant produces what. The keyword answer — Texas as the only state — depends on the DC plant remaining a production site and on no new state-hosted BEP printing facility opening. Neither is guaranteed forever.

Production volumes, per-facility splits, and note-life figures also drift with demand, denomination mix, and policy. The ranges cited here are context, not current-year commitments, and anyone citing exact current figures should pull them from the most recent BEP annual report or Treasury congressional justification rather than from a secondary article. The mechanics — offset plus intaglio on cotton-linen paper with embedded security features — are far more durable than the annual numbers.

One limitation of the keyword framing itself: it asks about "paper money," a term with no precise legal definition. The US Code speaks of "United States currency" and "Federal Reserve notes," and the BEP speaks of "currency" and "notes." If a reader means "anything printed on paper that functions as money," the answer still lands on Texas for federal notes, but the term invites the historical banknote confusion described above. Precision in the question is what makes the answer clean.

This article is general educational information about currency production, not legal, financial, or numismatic appraisal advice. For questions about the value of specific notes, tax treatment of collectibles, or authentication of currency, consult a qualified appraiser, accountant, or the Bureau of Engraving and Printing directly.