Currency Converter Details

FXConverter is a multilingual currency converter for over 190 currencies and 4 metals. It uses daily OANDA Rates®, the touchstone foreign exchange rates used by corporations, tax authorities, auditing firms, and financial institutions. These filtered rates are based on information supplied by leading market data contributors.

Do Interbank Rates Apply to Me?

The bid and ask prices we receive from our data sources are interbank prices, and not the retail exchange prices you might receive from your bank or an exchange agency. Interbank rates are the "official" rates quoted in the media, such as The Wall Street Journal. They reflect the market rates for transactions of US $1 million or more, while retail prices include commissions and special charges that a bank or exchange agency demands to convert currencies.

For the smaller amounts typically used in a retail setting, the spreads (the difference between the buy and sell prices) are typically wider than interbank spreads, and vary between payment systems, countries and banks. These "retail" rates used by credit cards or banks or other exchange services will include margins of anywhere from 1 to 10 percent or more on top of the interbank spread.

How Do I Choose the Rate that Appplies to Me?

If you need the official rate, choose the "interbank rate". Because this rate is seldom available to the general public, to avoid disappointment you should choose a percentage add-on from the rate list to approximate the retail rate charged by your financial institution:

  • If you are using your credit cards for foreign currency transactions and your foreign and home currencies are among the major currencies, choose the typical credit card rate, which includes a 2% margin on the top of the interbank rate;
  • If you are going to be exchanging cash for travel or foreign purchases and your foreign and home currencies are among the major currencies, choose the typical cash rate, which includes a 4% margin on the top of the interbank rate. This rate is usually close to the rate you will get from your bank for exchanging major currencies.
  • Less frequently traded currencies are often sold with higher margins. If you expect exchange rates different from the typical rates, you can choose a different margin: "Interbank +3%" or "Interbank + 6%", and so on.

Note: Because retail rates vary widely by institution and by country, we can only suggest these typical rates. Check with the vendor or financial institution you are dealing with to know the exact rates you are being charged.

What is Bid and Ask?

When you convert currency, you sell one currency to buy another. Your financial institution charges you a different rate if you are selling a currency (the bid rate) or buying a currency (the ask rate). This means that if you go to a bank in your home country, you will pay more of your home currency to receive foreign currency than you would get back if you were to return the same foreign currency to get your home currency.

In the foreign exchange market, players such as banks and corporations buy and sell currencies openly:

  • Bid is the price at which buyers offer to buy currencies from sellers.
  • Ask is the price at which sellers offer currencies to buyers. Ask prices are usually slightly higher than bid prices, reflecting the profit margins of sellers.

How Are OANDA's Rates Calculated?

For major currencies, our rates can be based on tens of thousands of different price points, collected 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We collect these rates from live data suppliers in raw form and filter them with innovative filtering processes to remove false prices and validate the data. The filtered rates are used to compute conversion results from interbank market rates.

We update the OANDA rates daily at 22:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). We take averages of the filtered bid, ask, and median rates, and average the prices from each day.

Are the Rates Equally Accurate For All Currencies?

The period of time over which the average bid/ask currency price is taken depends on the availability of data for the particular currency. When possible, we take the average of prices over the last 24 hours, but sometimes we must take the average of prices for a longer period of time.

For example, prices for currencies of the top seven industrial countries (G7) can be updated every few seconds when their markets are open, resulting in tens of thousands of price points each day for these currencies. By contrast, the prices for the currencies of some emerging market countries are perhaps published once per day or even less, resulting in only a few price points each week for these currencies.

Note: You may see the message, "Estimated price based on daily US dollar rates." This message is displayed for currency pairs where relatively little data is available, and means that the exchange rate for the converted currencies was computed from cross rates with the US dollar.

Can I View Historic Rates?

To see the rates for foreign currency transactions you may have made in the past, change the date on the FXConverter to view the historic rate for any day back to January, 1990.

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