Pound sign in LaTeX

The LaTeX command for pounds (£) is \pounds.

\pounds

Text Symbols · Unicode £ (U+00A3) · no package needed

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Which command should you use?

Command	Package	Use it when
`\pounds` recommended	none	Pound sterling, in text or math.
`\textsterling`	none	Explicit text-mode command.
`£`	none	Typed directly with UTF-8 input.

Table 1. Ways to write pounds in LaTeX. Every line was compiled with pdfLaTeX (TeX Live 2026) loading only the package shown.

Write \pounds in normal text, outside math mode. It is part of core LaTeX, so no extra package is required.

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Use \pounds in normal text; it needs no extra package. For example, \pounds.

None: \pounds is built into LaTeX, so no extra package is required.

Which command should you use?

Command	Package	Use it when
`\pounds` recommended	none	Pound sterling, in text or math.
`\textsterling`	none	Explicit text-mode command.
`£`	none	Typed directly with UTF-8 input.

Table 1. Ways to write pounds in LaTeX. Every line was compiled with pdfLaTeX (TeX Live 2026) loading only the package shown.