Turning one currency into another, step by step
1. Type the amount you actually have
Whole numbers, decimals, a salary, a single unit — it all works. Leave it at 1 if what you want is the plain rate rather than a total. A negative number is treated as zero rather than shown as negative money.
2. Choose the currency you are starting from
The list carries roughly 160 currencies, each shown with its ISO code and its full name, so you are not guessing whether CHF is the Swiss franc or something else. Your last pair is remembered in your own browser for next time.
3. Choose the currency you want to end up with
The two arrows between the boxes swap the pair without retyping anything. Converting a currency into itself is allowed and answers exactly 1, which is a useful sanity check rather than an error.
4. Read the answer and the rate beneath it
The large figure is your amount converted. Below it sit both directions of the rate — what one unit of the first currency buys, and what one unit of the second buys back — because the reverse trip is what most arguments about exchange rates are really about.
5. Pick a date if you need a past rate
Choose any day back to 4 January 1999 and the figures switch to the rate published on that day. If no rate exists for the day you picked, the tool says which day it used instead. It does not relabel today’s number.
6. Look at the movement before you decide anything
The chart draws the pair over 30 days, 90 days, a year or five years, with the high, the low, the change across the period, and how many days were actually published. One rate on one day tells you very little on its own.
Where the numbers on this page come from
Most currency converters online will tell you their rates are “live” or “reliable” and leave it there. That is not a source, so here is the actual plumbing.
For the thirty currencies the European Central Bank covers, every figure on this page is an ECB euro foreign exchange reference rate. The ECB sets these once per working day: the central banks of Europe hold a concertation procedure at around 14:10 Central European Time, and the resulting rates are published at around 16:00 CET. They are quoted against the euro, so a dollar-to-rupee figure is derived by passing through the euro leg. We retrieve them through Frankfurter, an open service that republishes the ECB series, including its full archive back to 4 January 1999.
For everything outside that set — the Pakistani rupee, the Nigerian naira, the Vietnamese dong and around a hundred and thirty others — the figure comes from ExchangeRate-API, cross-calculated through the US dollar. That source publishes today’s rate only. When you are on a pair it covers, the date picker and the chart switch themselves off and tell you why, because offering a date field that quietly ignores you is precisely the fault this page was rebuilt to remove.
Whichever source answered, the line under the result names it and stamps the publication date. If neither can be reached, you get a sentence saying so and no figures at all. There is no stored rate table in this page to fall back on. A stale number that looks current is worse than no number, and this tool used to have exactly that problem.
The rate here is not the rate you will be charged
This is the part worth reading before you plan around any conversion.
A reference rate is the middle of the market — roughly the midpoint between what buyers were offering and what sellers were asking at one moment in the day. Nobody actually transacts there. The ECB is unusually blunt about this: its rates are “published for information purposes only”, and it states that using them for transaction purposes “is strongly discouraged”.
What you are quoted in real life sits on one side of that midpoint. A bank converting your salary, a card network settling a foreign purchase, an airport kiosk and a remittance app all take a margin on the rate itself, and several of them add a fee on top of that. The margin is usually the larger cost and the harder one to see, because it arrives disguised as the exchange rate rather than as a charge.
So use the number on this page as a yardstick, not a price. Convert your amount here, then compare it against what your provider says you will receive. The gap between the two is what the conversion is costing you, and once you can see it in your own currency it becomes a normal thing to shop around for.
That is the whole reason to look up a reference rate before you transfer anything. A provider advertising “zero fees” may still be taking three per cent on the rate, and a provider charging a visible fee may hand you more money in the end. You cannot compare the two without a neutral number to measure both against.
Reading the two rate lines under the result
The tool always shows the pair in both directions, for example 1 USD = 95.39 INR and 1 INR = 0.010483 USD. The second line is simply one divided by the first, but people misread this constantly, so it is worth being explicit: those two statements are the same fact, not two different rates, and neither is “the real one”.
Which direction feels natural depends on the pair. Nobody says the rupee is worth about a hundredth of a dollar; they say the dollar is worth about ninety-five rupees. But for a pair like the euro and the pound, both directions read comfortably, and quoting habits differ by country. Showing both removes an entire category of confusion, particularly when you are checking a figure somebody else has given you.
The small currencies are where this matters most. When one unit is worth a tiny fraction of the other, two decimal places round the answer into uselessness, so the tool widens the precision automatically as the number gets smaller.
Choosing a date, and the days that simply have no rate
The ECB has published a reference rate for every working day since 4 January 1999, which is the day the euro series begins. That archive is what the date picker reads.
It does not cover every calendar day, and no amount of interface polish can change that. There is no rate for a Saturday or a Sunday, because the concertation procedure does not run. There is also no rate on TARGET closing days — the handful of dates the euro payment system shuts, which include New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, 1 May, and 25 and 26 December.
Ask for one of those days and the tool will show you the last published working day before it and say so in a notice, naming both dates. That is deliberate. The honest answer to “what was the dollar worth on Sunday” is that nobody published a figure, and the nearest one is Friday’s.
One more wrinkle, which surprises people looking a long way back: the reference list itself has changed over the years. Currencies have joined it and left it, some because their countries adopted the euro. So a pair that works perfectly for a date in 2024 can come back empty for a date in 2001. When that happens the tool tells you the rate was not published rather than pretending the request was malformed.
Thirty currencies with a history, and about a hundred and thirty without
It is worth being clear about the trade-off, because it decides which features you get.
The ECB set is small and deep. Thirty currencies, published daily by a central bank, archived for more than twenty-five years, free to check against the source. For any pair inside it you get the historical date, the period chart, the high and low, and a figure you can independently verify on the ECB’s own website.
The wider set is broad and shallow. It reaches almost every currency in circulation, which matters if you are sending money to Lagos or pricing work for a client in Ho Chi Minh City, but it is today’s number and nothing else. So for those pairs the tool converts, names its source, and switches off the two features it cannot honestly support.
You can tell which mode you are in without hunting: the source line under the result changes, and the chart area explains itself instead of sitting blank.
What the period chart is actually plotting
The chart draws one point per published day, not per calendar day. That is why a thirty-day view typically shows around twenty-two points and a one-year view around two hundred and fifty-five — weekends and closing days are absent because no rate exists for them.
Four figures sit under the line. The change across the period is measured from the first published day to the last, in per cent. The low and the high are the extremes actually reached within the window, which is usually more informative than the endpoints alone: a pair can finish a year almost where it started and still have swung ten per cent in between. The count of published days tells you how much data the line is really made of.
The vertical axis does not start at zero, and that is intentional for exchange rates. A currency pair that moves two per cent has moved a great deal, and a zero-based axis would flatten that into a straight line and hide it. Read the axis labels rather than the steepness.
Decimals, minor units, and the currencies that do not use them
The result is formatted the way the destination currency is actually written, following the conventions catalogued in ISO 4217, the standard that also gives every currency its three-letter code.
Most currencies split into hundredths and show two decimal places. The Japanese yen has no minor unit in everyday use, so amounts appear whole. A few Gulf currencies, the Kuwaiti dinar and Bahraini dinar among them, divide into thousandths and carry three decimal places. Forcing two decimals onto all of them, which is what the previous build did, prints amounts that no speaker of those currencies would ever write.
The rate lines are a separate case and deliberately carry more precision than the money figures, because a rate rounded to two places is not enough to reproduce a large conversion. If you are checking somebody else’s arithmetic, work from the rate line rather than from the rounded total.
When this tool will tell you it cannot answer
Most converters never admit to a bad day. This one will, in four situations, and in each case it shows you nothing rather than something plausible:
- Neither rate source can be reached. The currency lists stay empty and the page says so.
- The ECB series is unreachable for a pair inside its set. No rate is shown, and the message states explicitly that no stored rate will be substituted.
- You asked for a date on a pair whose source has no history. The date is cleared, with the reason given, and you are shown today’s rate clearly labelled as today’s.
- The ECB published no rate for that currency on that date. The tool names the date and explains that the reference list changes over time.
None of that is decoration. Between roughly 2021 and August 2026, this page answered every failed request with a hardcoded table of rates that were years out of date — the Turkish lira was out by more than eighty per cent, the yen by thirty-one, the rupee by twenty-two — with nothing on screen to suggest anything had gone wrong. Refusing to answer is the fix.
Everything here happens in your browser
The conversion itself is arithmetic performed on your own device. The page requests published rate data from the sources named above and does the maths locally; your amounts are never sent anywhere, because there is no reason for anyone else to see what you are converting. The currency pair and amount you used last are kept in your browser’s local storage so the tool opens where you left it, and clearing your browser data removes them.
Questions people ask when converting money
Why does my bank give me less than this page says?
Because this is the mid-market reference rate and your bank is selling you currency. It applies a margin to the rate, often between one and four per cent depending on the provider and the pair, and may add a transfer or conversion fee as well. The difference between the figure here and what you actually receive is the total cost of the conversion, and it is worth comparing across providers.
How often does the rate on this page change?
For the ECB currencies, once per working day, at around 16:00 Central European Time. It genuinely does not change again until the next publication, so a rate that looks static in the evening is correct rather than stuck. Currencies served by the wider source update on that provider’s own schedule, which is roughly daily.
Is this a live market rate, updated by the second?
No, and any free converter claiming otherwise is worth a second look. Genuine tick-by-tick interbank data is a licensed commercial product. What you have here is an official daily reference published by a central bank, which is more authoritative for checking a figure and less useful for trading — which is the right trade-off for the reasons most people convert currency.
Can I use these figures for my accounts or a tax return?
Check what your tax authority requires before you do. Many of them specify a particular published rate for converting foreign income, and it is often a national one rather than the ECB’s. In India, for instance, the reference rate for the rupee is published by the Financial Benchmarks India Private Limited and archived by the Reserve Bank of India, and those are the numbers an assessing officer will expect to see. Use this page to check your working, not as the citation.
Why is there no rate for the date I chose?
Almost always because it was a Saturday, a Sunday or a TARGET closing day, on which no rate is published at all. The tool falls back to the previous working day and names both dates. If it is a weekday well in the past, the other possibility is that the currency was not on the ECB reference list then.
How far back can I actually go?
To 4 January 1999, the first day of the euro reference series. Anything earlier does not exist in this source, for any pair.
Why do some currencies have no chart?
Because their rates come from the wider source, which publishes only today’s figure. Rather than drawing a line from data it does not have, the tool says which of your two currencies is outside the ECB set.
Which is the “real” rate, USD to INR or INR to USD?
Both, and they are the same fact stated two ways. One is the reciprocal of the other. Quoting convention varies by country and by pair, which is exactly why this page shows you both instead of picking one for you.
The number moved between two visits. Did something break?
Probably not. If you crossed a publication time, or a weekend ended, the rate genuinely changed. The date stamp under the result tells you which day’s rate you are looking at, so comparing stamps will usually explain the difference in a few seconds.
Do you store what I convert?
No. The arithmetic runs in your browser and the amounts are never transmitted. The only thing kept is your last currency pair and amount, stored locally in your own browser so the tool opens ready for you.
Other tools that often come up alongside this one
- Unit Converter — for the metric-and-imperial half of the same problem when you are pricing goods across borders.
- Number to Words Converter — for writing an amount out in full on a cheque, contract or invoice.
- Invoice Generator — when the converted figure needs to end up on a document for a client abroad.
- Percentage Calculator — for working out the margin between this rate and the one you were quoted.
- Time Zone Converter — useful for catching the 16:00 CET publication in your own local time.