Currency converter: euro reference rates, dated

The European Central Bank publishes these rates for statistical purposes, from a snapshot of the interbank market taken in the early afternoon. It is a midpoint between what buyers pay and what sellers ask, which means nobody trades at it, not even a bank. Every real transaction sits on one side of it. The gap is the margin, and it is never zero. A card payment abroad adds its own, and if the terminal offers to charge you in your home currency instead of the local one, that offer carries a rate chosen by the terminal's operator and not by your bank. Paying in the local currency is the one decision that keeps the rate on your own bank's side of the counter.

The source publishes one number per currency: how many of it one euro buys. It does not publish dollar against yen. When you convert between two currencies and neither is the euro, this page divides one published rate by the other, and the line under the result says that it did. That calculation is exact arithmetic on two published figures, and no better than they are. Both are collected at the same moment on the same day, so the cross is coherent, but it is a derived number and it carries the rounding of its two parents.

It keeps no history and draws no chart. It makes no forecast. It gives no advice about when to change money, which would be financial advice, and this is a unit converter. It measures nothing about you: there is no analytics on this page, and everything it loads comes from this site and nowhere else. It is also not a price. A number here tells you what a sum is worth at a published reference rate on a stated day. It does not tell you what you will be charged, and no converter on the internet can tell you that, because that figure is set by whoever handles your transaction.

Published. The European Central Bank quotes every currency against the euro, so the euro against the dollar is exactly what it publishes, with no division on our side. Most other pairs on this site are crosses of two published figures, and those pages say so.

Because a reference rate is a midpoint between what buyers pay and what sellers ask, published for statistical purposes. Nobody trades at it, not even a bank. The gap is the margin, and a card payment abroad adds its own on top.