Mid-market rate vs. what your bank or card actually charges

Plug a number into this converter (or almost any "live exchange rate" tool online) and you'll get a number back. Do the equivalent conversion through your bank, a credit card purchase abroad, or an airport currency kiosk, and you'll almost always get a worse number. That's not a bug in either one. They're answering different questions.

What "mid-market rate" actually means

This converter, like most online currency tools, shows the mid-market rate, sometimes called the interbank rate. It's the midpoint between the buy and sell price that large banks and financial institutions trade currencies at with each other, in bulk, with no markup added. It's the closest thing to an objective "real" exchange rate at a given moment. It's also a rate that, as an individual, you generally can't actually transact at.

Why your bank or card charges something different

Banks, card networks, and currency exchange kiosks aren't trading in bulk with other banks when they convert your money. They're providing a retail service to one customer at a time, and that service costs them something to run: staffing a kiosk, maintaining the infrastructure behind a card network, holding foreign currency inventory, absorbing the risk that rates move against them before they can offset the trade. To cover that, and to make a profit, they add a spread on top of the mid-market rate, and sometimes a flat fee on top of that.

A "spread" just means the rate you're quoted is shifted slightly worse than the mid-market number in whichever direction favors the provider: a bit less foreign currency for your dollars when you're buying, or a bit less back in your home currency when you're selling. It's built into the quoted rate itself, so it can be easy to miss. A flat fee, when one is charged separately, is usually easier to spot since it shows up as its own line item.

Where that markup actually goes

In most cases it's simply the provider's margin for doing the conversion, the same way any business prices a service above its own cost. Airport kiosks tend to have the widest spreads of all, largely because they're serving a captive audience with few alternatives in the moment. Bank and card network markups are usually narrower but still real, and vary a fair amount between providers.

What this means when you're looking at a converter

Treat the rate shown here as a reference point: it tells you what a currency is worth right now, in the abstract, and is useful for tracking trends, estimating roughly what something will cost, or sanity-checking a rate someone else quoted you. It isn't a quote, and it isn't what you'll be charged. Before actually moving money, whether that's a transfer, a card purchase, or exchanging cash, check the specific rate and any fees your bank or provider quotes at that moment. This site doesn't recommend a specific provider or claim any of them is better than another; it's simply worth knowing that a gap between the mid-market rate and what you're charged is normal and expected, not a sign something went wrong.