Explained
Toman vs rial
The single most common way for someone outside Iran to misread an Iranian price by a factor of ten.
1 toman = 10 rial.
The rial is the official currency — what is printed on the banknotes and used in official statistics. The toman is what people actually speak and think in, and what shops, taxis and rate boards quote.
Why two units at all
The toman is an older unit that never went away in speech. After decades of high inflation, rial figures became unwieldy — quoting everyday prices in tens of millions is awkward — and the toman survived as the practical shorthand precisely because it removes a zero. The result is a country where the official currency and the spoken currency are different units.
Where this catches people out
- →International sources (XE, Google, Trading Economics) quote rial, because that is the official currency code (IRR). Iranian rate boards quote toman. Comparing the two directly makes it look like a tenfold discrepancy that is not there.
- →A price quoted to you by family in Iran is almost certainly in toman, even if they say "rial" in English translation.
- →Some boards quote in thousand toman for large figures. Check the column heading before doing the arithmetic.
A quick sanity check
If a figure looks ten times too big or too small against what you expected, the unit is the first thing to suspect — before the rate. Our calculator outputs toman throughout and states so, to avoid exactly this confusion.