Saudi Arabia's official currency symbol, approved by royal directive and encoded in Unicode 17.0. Final, and on Windows 11 and iPhone keyboards, though most fonts still haven't caught up.
The Saudi riyal sign (, U+20C1) is Saudi Arabia's official currency symbol, developed under a royal directive by a committee spanning the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Media, and the Saudi Standards organization. Its design draws on Arabic calligraphy, forming the Arabic letters of "ريال" (riyal) with the rāʾ (ر) letter's stroke doubling as a crossbar, in the same visual family as other crossbar-based currency symbols like the dollar and pound. King Salman officially approved the design on February 20, 2025, and SAMA submitted it for Unicode encoding shortly after (proposal L2/25-075, dated March 7, 2025). The Unicode Technical Committee approved it without changes at its 183rd meeting, April 22–24, 2025, and it shipped as a final, ratified character in Unicode 17.0 on September 9, 2025: a full version ahead of the UAE dirham, Omani rial, and Maldivian rufiyaa signs, which followed in Unicode 18.0 on September 16, 2026. Being final doesn't mean it's everywhere yet, though. Microsoft added it to Windows 11's Arabic keyboard layouts in December 2025 (AltGr+S on Arabic 101), and iPhone users reported it on the iOS Arabic keyboard from March 24, 2026. As of September 25, 2026, requests to add the glyph to Inter, one of the most widely used open-source typefaces, and to Google's Noto Arabic fonts are still open, a sign that font coverage is still catching up a full Unicode version after ratification. In the meantime, an open-source font (built specifically for this symbol) and community guides for using it in Word, Excel, and on the web already exist.
The confirmed, final character: encoded in Unicode 17.0, copyable today, though most fonts don't render it natively yet.
Need more than this one? Browse the full set in Currency Symbols →
Three more regional currencies got their own Unicode signs the following version, in Unicode 18.0, published on September 16, 2026.
For contrast: regional currency symbols that cleared the standard-to-font gap years ago and render on virtually any device today.
| Method | Input |
|---|---|
| Unicode | U+20C1 |
| Word (Windows) | 20C1 → Alt+X |
| HTML entity | ⃁ |
| CSS content | content: "\20C1" |
Unicode 18.0's publication on September 16, 2026, which added the three signs listed above, is confirmed by the Unicode Consortium's Unicode 18.0 announcement. The Windows 11 Arabic keyboard support is documented in Microsoft's KB5070311 release notes, and the sign's arrival on the iPhone keyboard rests on users' own posts from March 24, 2026 on X and Instagram. The open font requests are Inter issue 842 and notofonts/arabic issue 291.
A Discord nickname stops at 32 characters, an Instagram bio at 150, a TikTok bio at 80, and X weights some characters as two. The UltraTextGen counter reads all of them at once, and counts a multi-codepoint Unicode emoji the way each platform actually bills it.
Open the character counter →Every world currency symbol you can already copy and paste today.
Where every Middle East currency stands in Unicode today: five with their own sign, three sharing one, seven with none.
The UAE's new currency symbol, final one Unicode version later, in Unicode 18.0.
Another Gulf currency symbol, published in the same Unicode 18.0 release.
The dated status tracker this symbol's own Gulf-currency cousin gets.
Belarus's official currency symbol.
The Maldives' own currency symbol, built from the Thaana letter ރ.