ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Iran’s currency has lost three times its value since US President Donald Trump’s second term began in late January amid heavy international sanctions, prompting Tehran to take measures such as removing zeros from the rial to stabilize it.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has adopted increasingly tougher policies against Iran. In February, he signed a national security presidential memorandum, restoring his maximum pressure policy on Iran and detailing a series of new economic measures against the Islamic republic. 

Iran’s free-market rate exceeded 118,000 toman per US dollar on Tuesday, reflecting a sharp decline in the currency’s value. 

Back in February, the free-market rate was around 39,000 toman per dollar, according to TGJU, a popular Iranian platform for tracking gold, coin, and currency prices.

The rial is Iran’s official currency, but the toman is more commonly used for ease of calculation with one zero less.

In October, Iran announced that government authorities had approved a plan to remove four zeros from the national currency, a move experts warned could send a negative signal unless the economy is stabilized and inflation brought under control.

“Unfortunately, the country’s economy is tied to the dollar,” Tehran representative Abdolhossein Ruholamini said Tuesday during a parliamentary session, criticizing Central Bank officials’ plans to stabilize the economy, state-owned IRNA reported.

The initiatives taken by the Central Bank “were in the interest of the people in the short term,” he said, but “its long-term effects can now be seen on the table of Iranians.”

Over the past decade, Iran’s currency has sharply depreciated, with the rial falling from about 3,000 tomans per US dollar in October 2015 to 118,000 tomans per dollar in December 2025, a decline of nearly 3,833 percent.

The currency’s collapse has put extreme pressure on Iranian households. 

Under Iran’s 2025 budget law, the average monthly income for a minimum-wage government worker who is married with one child and has one year of experience is about 10 million toman, roughly $84. 

The World Bank’s updated global poverty line is $3 per person per day.

In October, financial expert Mason Farhad Nariman told The New Region that successful currency redenominations require prior economic stabilization, warning that Iran’s plan to remove four zeros from its rial without such reforms could be seen as “a negative signal.”