Every way of changing money between currencies charges twice: once in the fee you see, and once in a rate a little worse than the real one. A service advertising “zero fees” has usually moved the whole charge into the rate.

Type what a service quotes - its rate, or what it says will arrive - and its fee. This compares it with today’s mid-market rate and says what you lose, in naira and as a share of your money. Nothing you type leaves this page.

Is this a good rate? Exchange rate and fee checker

Type what a money transfer service, bank or bureau de change offers, and see how much you lose against the live mid-market rate, fee and margin together.

What counts as a good rate

The mid-market rate is the midpoint between what banks pay for a currency and what they sell it for. Nobody sells to the public at it, so some gap is normal. The question is how big.

The best yardstick there is comes from the United Nations. One of its Sustainable Development Goals, target 10.c, is to bring the cost of sending money home below 3% - fee and exchange rate margin together - and to end any route that costs more than 5%. The checker judges every quote against those two lines.

There is no official yardstick for a bureau de change or a bank selling you dollars. The checker uses the same two lines for those, and says so.

How to use it well

  • Compare at the same moment. Rates move through the day, and an app’s quote is usually held for a few minutes only.
  • Compare what arrives, not the fee. Two quotes for the same amount can be compared on the naira delivered alone, which already counts both charges.
  • Check the amount. Many services charge a smaller share on a larger transfer, so check the sum you will actually send.
  • Count the other end. A charge to withdraw from a domiciliary account, or a cash pickup fee, is a cost too.

Where the rate comes from

The mid-market rate is fetched by this site from an open exchange rate service and kept for an hour, so your browser asks no third party anything. The source and the time it was set are printed under every result. It is not the Central Bank of Nigeria’s official rate, and it is not the parallel market’s; to compare against either, or against another service’s quote, open “Compare against another rate” and type it in.

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