500 euro note rapidly so that in the first 7 years (up to December 2008) there were 530,064,413 five hundred euro banknotes in circulation. Subsequently, the rate of increase was radically slowed. In August 2018, there were approximately 515,000,000 banknotes in circulation (decreased from 614,000,000 in 2015). It is the second least widely circulated denomination, accounting for 2.4% of the total banknotes. It is the largest note measuring 160 × 82 mm and has a purple colour scheme. The five hundred euro banknotes depict bridges and arches/doorways in modern architecture (around the late 20th century). The five hundred euro note contains several complex
Euro banknotes in the United Kingdom: Thomas De La Rue, a major private printer, and the Bank of England printing house, which does not produce euro banknotes. Unlike euro coins, euro notes do not have a national side indicating which country issued them. The country that issued them is not necessarily where they were printed. The information about the issuing country is encoded within the first character of each note's serial number instead. The first character of the serial number is a letter which uniquely identifies the country that issues the note. The remaining 11 characters are numbers which, when their digital