How the currency rates are made
Every rate on these pages is a reference rate: a figure a central bank or a data service fixes once a day as a benchmark. It is not a rate anyone will buy or sell at. We show each rate with its own date and the time we fetched it, and we never estimate or fill in a day that was not published.
For the US dollar, the pound, the euro, the yen and the other major currencies we take the European Central Bank’s euro reference rates, published at about 16:00 Central European Time (19:30 or 20:30 IST) on euro-area business days. The ECB publishes every rate against the euro, so a rupee rate is a cross rate: the rupees per euro divided by the units of the currency per euro. On 22 Oct 2026, 1 US dollar = ₹94.82 came from ₹106.25 per euro and 1.1205 dollars per euro. The euro’s own rate is the ECB figure as published.
The UAE dirham, the Saudi riyal, the Qatari riyal, the Omani rial and the Bahraini dinar are fixed to the US dollar by their central banks at published pegs: 1 USD = 3.6725 AED (Central Bank of the UAE); 1 USD = 3.75 SAR (Saudi Central Bank (SAMA)); 1 USD = 3.64 QAR (Qatar Central Bank); 1 USD = 0.3845 OMR (Central Bank of Oman); 1 USD = 0.376 BHD (Central Bank of Bahrain). Their rupee rates are the USD/INR cross rate divided by the peg, and each page says so. Were a central bank to change its peg, the figure in our peg file would change with it, from that date on.
The Kuwaiti dinar floats against a basket of currencies, so it has no fixed peg and no ECB rate. Its rupee rate comes from ExchangeRate-API’s open endpoint, updated once a day at about 05:30 IST (Rates By Exchange Rate API).
Banks, forex cards and remittance apps quote a margin over the reference rate and add fees: you receive a little less than the reference when sending money to India and pay a little more when buying foreign currency. The converters on these pages use the reference rate with no margin, so you can compare the rate you are offered with it.
The ECB rates are fetched at 21:00 IST on weekdays and ExchangeRate-API at 06:00 IST every day. On weekends and euro-area holidays the pages show the last business day’s rate with its own date. The 30-day history on each page is the ECB’s own series, which we backfilled from its published archive back to 2 Jan 2009; nothing is padded.
UAE dirham · Saudi riyal · Qatari riyal · Omani rial · Bahraini dinar · Rates By Exchange Rate API · ECB