Currency Converter
Converts at the European Central Bank's daily reference rates, and shows what the same amount costs once a card or a bank takes its spread.
This tool needs JavaScript: the server makes the request, because a browser cannot read another site headers.
The ECB publishes rates for these against the euro. Anything else has to be crossed through a bank's own table.
This is one of the few tools here that asks the server rather than your browser, because a browser cannot do it. Nothing you put in is stored; the request is rate limited by address and the answer is not cached.
Converts at the European Central Bank’s daily reference rates, and then shows what the same amount is actually worth once somebody takes their cut. The second number is the one that matters, and no converter shows it.
How to use
Put in the amount and pick the two currencies. The rates are the ECB’s, published once each working day at about 16:00 Central European time.
Example
100 euros into dollars:
100.00 EUR 114.03 USD
Rate 1 EUR = 1.1403 USD
The other way 1 USD = 0.876962 EUR
Rates published 2026-09-25 by the European Central Bank
What you will actually pay
reference rate 114.03 USD
at 1% spread 112.89 USD, a good card
at 3% spread 110.61 USD, a typical bank
at 5% spread 108.33 USD, an airport bureauThe gap between the first line and the last is 5.70 dollars on a hundred. On a 20,000 euro invoice it is over a thousand.
Pitfalls
Nobody trades at the reference rate. It exists so that contracts, accounts and customs declarations have one agreed number. What you are offered is that rate plus a spread, and the spread is where the money is made.
The rates are daily, not live. One publication each working day, so a rate here can be a day old and is always stale over a weekend or a holiday. For anything time-sensitive, use the rate your provider quotes at the moment of the transaction.
A “0% commission” bureau still charges you. The fee is in the rate. Compare the rate against the reference figure rather than reading the fee line.
Card conversion offered by the terminal is the expensive option. When a foreign card machine asks whether to charge in your home currency, that is dynamic currency conversion, and the rate is chosen by the merchant’s provider. Always pay in the local currency.
The ECB list is not every currency. About thirty are published against the euro. Anything else has to be crossed through somebody’s own table, and that table is the thing to check.
Invoices need the rate and the date on them. Most tax authorities accept the central bank rate for the date of supply, and it is the date rather than the rate that gets argued about.
Rounding at two decimals is a decision, not a fact. For a single amount it is fine. For thousands of line items, round once at the end or you will be a few units out and unable to say where.
Compatibility
The ECB’s eurofxref-daily.xml feed, which is public, free and needs no key. It is fetched at most once
every six hours and kept in a transient, since the feed itself changes once a working day.
This is one of the few tools here that asks the server, because a browser cannot fetch a feed from another origin that does not allow it.
Every rate is quoted against the euro, so a cross rate between two other currencies is one division and one multiplication. That is the same arithmetic the ECB expects, and it is why a EUR pair is exact while any other pair carries the rounding of two published figures.
Rates more than three days old are flagged rather than shown silently, which is what happens over a long holiday.