Currency converter

How the conversion works

Every rate in the table is quoted against a single base currency. Converting between any two currencies is therefore two steps: divide out of the source currency into the base, then multiply into the target.

result = amount / rate(from) × rate(to)

This is why the table can grow without the arithmetic changing. It also means all cross-rates are internally consistent: converting A to B to C gives exactly the same answer as converting A to C directly, which is not always true of quoted retail rates.

Mid-market versus what you pay

The rate shown here is the mid-market rate — the midpoint between the best bid and the best offer on the interbank market. It is the rate you see quoted in news reports, and it is the rate almost nobody actually transacts at.

The practical consequence is that where you convert matters far more than when, for any amount an individual is likely to move. A 12% airport spread wipes out a year of favourable rate movement in a single transaction.

What a margin is worth in money

Converting $5,000 into euros, varying only how far the applied rate sits below mid-market. Rates as of 2026-09-01.

The 0% row is the mid-market rate itself, which nobody will actually give you. It is the baseline. Measured in the currency you are sending, the margin translates directly into a proportion of the amount: on $5,000, 1% is $50, 3% is $150 and 5% is $250.

None of that appears under “fees”, because it is built into the rate — which is exactly how a provider can charge it and advertise no fees at the same time. When comparing options, the number to compare is not the fee. It is the distance between the quoted rate and the mid-market one.

The same margin, at different sizes

Margin fixed at 3%, varying only the amount converted.

Because the margin is a rate, the cost scales exactly with the amount. On $500 it is $15 — plausibly worth paying to avoid the hassle of shopping around. On $20,000 it is $600, which is a different conversation entirely. That proportionality is the whole reason comparing providers pays off on tuition payments and property deposits, and mostly does not on holiday money.

Cross rates for the major currencies

Generated from the same rate table the calculator uses, as of 2026-09-01. Each cell is one unit of the row currency expressed in the column currency.

The table refreshes daily and is still only indicative. Currencies move for as long as markets are open, so these figures will differ from whatever you are quoted when you actually trade. The date is on the page so that you can judge how much that gap is likely to be — and before moving a large sum, check against the rate your provider is offering at the time.

Dynamic currency conversion

When a foreign card terminal asks whether you want to pay in your home currency, it is offering dynamic currency conversion. It sounds helpful — you see a familiar number — but the conversion is performed by the merchant's payment processor at a rate it sets, commonly 3–6% worse than the network rate. Always choose the local currency and let your own card network do the conversion.

Why the rate age is on the page

Most converters show a number with no indication of when it was true. In a calm week, a rate three days old is within a fraction of a percent of the current one and perfectly usable for estimating a holiday budget or checking an invoice. In a week where a central bank moves, it can be several percent out.

Rather than hide that, the tool prints the capture date and the age in days, and warns when the table is more than a couple of days old. If you are about to send money, check a live source; if you are working out roughly what a hotel costs, this is fine.

Which rate a tax return or an invoice wants

The rate you are entitled to use is not always the rate you paid, and the two tax authorities most readers here deal with answer the question differently.

United States. The IRS has no official exchange rate. It expects you to translate each item at the spot rate prevailing when you received the income, paid the expense, or accrued it, and it generally accepts any posted rate used consistently. Where income arrives evenly through the year, the yearly average rate the IRS publishes is acceptable instead. “Consistently” is the operative word: picking the source that flatters each individual transaction is what gets questioned.

Japan. The National Tax Agency is more specific. The default for a foreign-currency transaction is the TTM — the midpoint between a bank's telegraphic transfer buying and selling rates on the transaction date. TTB or TTS may be used instead in defined cases, again provided the choice is applied consistently rather than per transaction.

Both rules point at a mid-market rate on a specific date, which is exactly what this tool holds — but the table here is a snapshot, not a bank's published rate for the day you traded. Use it to check an invoice, sanity-check what a card charged you, or budget. For a filing, take the rate from the bank you actually dealt with, or from the authority's own published table, and record which one you used.

The practical failure this avoids is small and common: converting a year of foreign invoices at today's rate because it is the one on screen. On a currency that moved 8% over the year, that is an 8% error on the largest number in the return.

A note on rounding

Currencies do not all have the same number of decimal places. Japanese yen and Korean won have none; most others have two; a few have three. The amounts here are formatted using each currency's own convention, so a yen figure will not show cents. The underlying calculation keeps full precision, and only the display is rounded.