Currency converter

What a reference rate actually is

Every working day around 16:00 Central European Time, the European Central Bank publishes one reference rate per currency — a midpoint drawn from the market, not a price anyone is selling at. It exists precisely so that everyone can agree on a neutral number: accountants use it to book foreign invoices, statistics offices use it, contracts cite it, and price comparisons start from it. That is the number this converter uses, for 30+ currencies, in any direction — converting between two non-euro currencies works through their euro rates, which is the standard way cross rates are derived everywhere. It makes this page the fair yardstick, and a fair yardstick is exactly what most paperwork needs. The midpoint is deliberately nobody's selling price — which is precisely what lets a contract or an expense policy cite it without argument from either side.

Why the money that arrives is always a bit less

Nobody transacts at the midpoint — every provider adds a margin, and the honest ones simply print it. A card payment abroad typically lands within a percent or two of the reference rate; airport exchange desks can take far more; and offers advertising zero commission recover it inside the rate itself, which is why comparing against the midpoint is the only comparison that means anything. The arithmetic is short: if the reference rate says 1.10 and an offer hands you 1.06, the margin is about 3.6 percent — a number no exchange desk will volunteer but this page gives you in one division. One concrete habit pays for itself: when a card terminal abroad offers to charge you in your home currency — so-called dynamic currency conversion — decline it and pay in the local currency. That convenient-looking button routinely carries one of the worst margins in mainstream finance.

Once per business day, and why that is enough

These rates update once per working day and stand still over weekends and ECB holidays — Friday's rate is the rate until Monday afternoon. For what people actually use this page for, that is a feature rather than a lag: an invoice, a travel budget, a price comparison or a bookkeeping entry wants a stable, citable daily figure, and the daily ECB reference is the one everyone else will be using too. What this page is not is a trading feed — currency markets move continuously, and anyone who genuinely needs minute-by-minute pricing needs a broker's screen, not a reference table. One timing detail saves confusion: because publication happens in the late afternoon, a rate you look up in the morning is still the previous working day's figure — that is normal, and it is the same figure everyone else's morning lookup shows too.

Fetched by your browser, seen by no one

The rate table is fetched directly by your browser from Frankfurter, an open-source service republishing the ECB's official figures — the request never passes through us. The amounts you type go one step further: they never leave the page at all, because the arithmetic happens on your own device. No account, no record anywhere of which currencies you compared or what sums you were weighing — which is not nothing, given that currency lookups tend to surround salaries, house purchases and relocations. The crypto prices page on this site works on exactly the same pattern, for the coins the ECB does not track.

Why your bank gives you a different rate

The rates here are the ECB's reference rates — the official daily midpoint, published every working day around 16:00 CET. Banks, card networks and exchange offices start from roughly this rate and add their own margin (typically 0.5–4%), which is why the money that actually arrives is always a bit less. Use this converter to know the fair midpoint before comparing offers.