website design - Best practice for currency input fields

I'm working on a web application, which I just received a request to make all input fields collecting currency data to be right aligned.

Is there a standard for collecting currency data in a web form that mention right aligning.

Answer

The reason that currency is normally right-aligned has to do with scanability.

It's normal to right-align any numerical data that is going to be scanned in a column. This is so that when you scan visually down the page, you're always comparing the same digits in each number.

If they're left-alighed you get this problem:

1111  
12222  
166666

If you scan visually down the left edge of this figure, in the first row, you're looking at a glyph which represents thousands, in the second row a glyph which represents 10 thousands, and in the third row a glyph which represents 100 thousands.

These glyphs aren't directly comparable.

If the numbers are instead presented like this:

  1111  
 12222  
166666

Then as you look down from a glyph to the glyph below you'll find it's directly comparable.

Since this property isn't really important on a web form, arbitrarily right-aligning a currency field there would just be cargo-cult UX.