From the euro foreign exchange reference rates of the European Central Bank. They are settled through a concertation procedure in which central banks compare quotes at around 14:15 CET, and the result is published at about 16:00 the same day. We show them unchanged, with the date of the fix next to every figure, and we publish no rate whose origin we cannot name.
Once per ECB working day. There is one value per currency per day rather than a live price, so a rate here will not match an intraday quote on a trading platform. Nothing new is published at weekends or on TARGET closing days — 1 January, Good Friday, Easter Monday, 1 May, and 25 and 26 December — and the last published fix then stays on screen with its date.
Because a reference rate is a benchmark, not an offer. A bank, a card scheme or an exchange bureau quotes a buying rate and a selling rate on either side of it and keeps the difference, and that spread is how the service is paid for. On a common pair it can be a fraction of a percent; at an airport counter it can exceed 10 percent.
Yes. The ECB publishes each rate as the number of units of the foreign currency that one euro buys, so a euro to dollar figure of 1.09 means one euro buys 1.09 dollars. Reading it the other way round is the most common mistake in currency conversion, because it means dividing where you should multiply. The converter handles the direction for you.
By dividing one euro reference rate by another. No institution publishes an official pound to franc or yen to dollar reference rate, so every such figure on every site is derived. Ours are calculated from the same day’s fixes and marked as derived. When another site shows a slightly different number, the cause is almost always rounding or a fix from a different day.
To January 1999, when the euro was introduced and the ECB began publishing the series. Currency pages use the most recent twelve months for the chart, for the 52-week high and low and for the year-on-year change. We hold no rates from before the euro existed, and no page on this site reconstructs one from an earlier national currency.
No. We do not exchange money, hold funds, broker transactions or provide any financial service, and we take no payment from anyone whose rate appears here. The site publishes public reference data with explanations of what it means, and is funded by advertising. Nothing on it is a recommendation to buy or sell a currency.
The site covers the currencies in the ECB reference list, which runs to about thirty and does not include every currency in the world. The list also changes: the ECB stopped publishing a Russian rouble reference rate on 1 March 2022 and has not resumed it. Where no reference rate exists we publish nothing, rather than an estimate borrowed from somewhere else.
No. There is no registration, no login and no paid tier, and every page — the converter, the currency pages, the cross-rate table and the charts — is open to anyone. We also offer no rate alerts, no e-mail notifications and no data feed, so there is nothing to sign up for even if you wanted to.
ECB reference rates are widely used for exactly that, and many tax authorities accept them for converting an amount in a foreign currency. But the rule that binds you is set by your own tax authority, not by us, and some require the rate of a specific date or the rate of the national central bank. Check the requirement before you rely on a figure from here.
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