Rates are European Central Bank reference rates published via Frankfurter (not live interbank quotes). Cached in your browser for the day. Needs the network once a day; offline it falls back to the last rates this browser saw, clearly dated.
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Sending —. Type what a provider says you will receive, and any fixed fee, and the page works out the spread you are really being charged and where it sits on the ladder. Two quotes are compared head to head.
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Every conversion above is the mid-market rate — the midpoint between what buyers and sellers are offering, and a rate no retail customer is given. What you are actually offered is that number moved against you by a spread, and the size of the spread is the entire product. It is quoted as a percentage because a percentage sounds small. Here is the same conversion at the spreads you will meet:
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Conversion is amount × (rateto / ratefrom) against EUR base rates, from the same source as the Unit Converter’s currencies.
The midpoint between what buyers and sellers ask on the wholesale market: right for what something ought to cost, wrong for what will leave your account.
“0% commission” and a bad rate can both be true. Judge any quote by its distance from mid-market, in percent.
ECB rates are published once on working days, so a weekend figure is Friday’s. Banks add spreads and fees on top.
Every rate has two sides: what the market will pay for a currency and what it will sell it for. The reference rate here sits halfway between. No retail provider trades at the midpoint: they sell you the currency above it and buy it back below, and that gap is the spread. So “no commission” and “no fees” can both be literally true while the deal is expensive. Judge any quote by the distance from the mid-market rate, in percent, and ignore how the cost is labelled.
When a foreign card machine or website offers to charge you in pounds instead of euros, that is dynamic currency conversion: the merchant’s payment processor picking the rate, typically 3–6% worse than the interbank one, and keeping the difference. On a €100 restaurant bill at a mid-market 1.170, the honest cost is about £85.50; a 4% DCC markup makes it £88.90. Decline the “helpful” conversion and let your own card issuer do it. This single habit usually saves more than shopping around for a card does.
ECB reference rates are published on working days, around 16:00 Central European Time. There is no Saturday figure, so a weekend conversion is quoting a number up to three days old, and providers know it, which is why weekend spreads are frequently wider to cover the risk of a Monday gap. For anything large, convert midweek.
At the mid-market rate the maths is perfectly reversible: multiply by a rate, divide by the same rate, and you are where you started. In reality you cross the spread twice, so a round trip costs roughly double the one-way markup. Change money for a trip that gets cancelled and 6% can quietly vanish. Buying currency you are not certain to spend is a decision with a price.
A few currencies are pegged or tightly managed (the Danish krone against the euro, the Hong Kong dollar against the US dollar), so a rate you memorised years ago is still roughly right. Free-floating pairs are a different matter: sterling and the euro have swung by a fifth inside a year. For a mental estimate, round the rate to something you can multiply in your head and accept a few percent of error; it is smaller than the spread you will pay anyway. The UAE dirham and the Saudi riyal are fixed to the dollar (3.6725 and 3.75), which the ECB does not publish, so this page derives them from the dollar rate.
No — they are ECB reference rates, typically updated once on working days. Banks add spreads and fees.
Fixed unit factors never change; exchange rates do. Your browser requests rates from Frankfurter and caches them for the day.
That the headline conversion is the mid-market reference rate, with no spread, commission or fixed fee — the best case you will never quite be offered. The real-cost panel then applies whatever spread and fixed fee you enter, and that is the figure to plan around. Neither knows what your own provider will actually charge: the defaults are typical, not quoted. Rates are fetched once and cached for the day, and the date they were published is shown next to the result. If the fetch fails the page falls back to the last rates this browser saw, shows their date and age in amber and says they may be out of date; with nothing saved it says so instead of guessing.
A card machine abroad, or a foreign website at checkout, offers to bill you in pounds instead of the local currency. It looks like a courtesy. It is called dynamic currency conversion, and it hands the exchange rate to the merchant's payment processor rather than to your card network. The processor picks its own rate and keeps the difference, and the difference is typically 3–6% — on top of anything your own bank charges. Visa and Mastercard's own wholesale rates sit within a fraction of a percent of the mid-market number this page shows you. Always choose the local currency, and the rate you get will be close to the top row of the chart above rather than the bottom.
These are European Central Bank reference rates, published once per working day at around 16:00 Central European Time. There is no Saturday figure and no Sunday figure. A rate you read on a Sunday is Friday's, and the market will have moved by the time you act on it. That matters most in the direction nobody expects: providers widen their spreads at weekends precisely because they are pricing a gap they cannot hedge, so a transfer booked on a Saturday is usually a worse deal than the same transfer on Tuesday. If the amount is large enough for the spread to matter, it is large enough to wait for a working day.
The real-cost panel takes both because they matter at opposite ends. A flat £5 fee on £100 is 5% and swamps any spread; the same fee on £10,000 is 0.05% and is irrelevant next to a 1% spread, which is £100. The crossover is wherever the fee divided by the amount equals the spread — so a £5 fee and a 1% spread cross at £500. Below that, hunt for the fee. Above it, ignore the fee and hunt for the spread.
Releases in which this page changed, newest last. Derived from the archived copy of every release, not from notes written afterwards — so it reflects what actually shipped. Site-wide passes are left out; they are in the full changelog.