Official Central Bank Exchange Rates

On this page, we’ll dive into the official exchange rates endpoints you can use to retrieve the exchange rates central banks like the ECB, the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England officially publish, including their full history.

Official rates are what accounting, invoicing, tax and customs rules usually refer to. Unlike /latest and /historical, which aggregate market data, these endpoints return each central bank’s own publication: one set of rates per business day, never blended, smoothed or filled in.

Sources

35 central banks and official fixing authorities on six continents. Each bank links to its public rate page with today’s rates, charts and yearly averages. More banks are added as they publish machine-readable rates.

Europe

Asia and the Middle East

Oceania

Americas

Africa

The currencies each bank publishes, its publication schedule and the exact first and last date of its history are available from /v3/official/sources. Rates are imported within the hour after a bank publishes them.

How the values work

• Normalised quotation. Banks quote in different directions and units (the CNB publishes CZK per 100 JPY, the Fed publishes USD per EUR but JPY per USD). Every value is normalised to units of currency per 1 unit of base_currency, like the rest of the API. Apart from that the values are exactly as published.
• Official against the bank’s currency. By default base_currency is the bank’s own currency (EUR for ecb, PLN for nbp, ...) and every value is official. With any other base_currency the values are cross rates calculated from the official ones, and meta.cross_rates is true. The bank’s own currency is included in that case, so source=nbp&base_currency=USD&currencies=PLN returns the official PLN rate for 1 USD.
• Business days only. Banks do not publish on weekends and holidays. When you request such a date, you get the bank’s newest publication from up to 14 days before it; meta.date tells you which day the rates are for. The NBU sets a rate for every calendar day, a day in advance.
• Publication references. Where a bank numbers its publications, meta.reference carries the number, e.g. the NBP table number (188/A/NBP/2026) or the TCMB bulletin number, so you can cite it on invoices and filings.
• Buying rates. A few banks (TCMB, Bank Indonesia, Nepal Rastra Bank) publish buying and selling rates but no middle rate. Their buying rate is served, as the rate type says; nothing is averaged.
• Precision. Some banks publish weak currencies with few significant digits (the Riksbank publishes 1 IDR as 0.00055 SEK). Those values are served as published, so cross rates derived from them are only as precise as the bank’s figure. Quotations with a single significant digit are too coarse to convert with and are left out.

curl -G https://api.currencyapi.com/v3/official \
    -d source=nbp \
    -d date=2026-09-28 \
    -d base_currency=USD \
    -d currencies=PLN \
    -H "apikey: YOUR-API-KEY"

{
    "meta": {
        "source": "nbp",
        "source_name": "National Bank of Poland",
        "date": "2026-09-28",
        "requested_date": "2026-09-28",
        "base_currency": "USD",
        "source_base_currency": "PLN",
        "cross_rates": true,
        "reference": "188/A/NBP/2026",
        "last_updated_at": "2026-09-28T10:07:12Z"
    },
    "data": {
        "PLN": {
            "code": "PLN",
            "value": 3.8478
        }
    }
}

curl -G https://api.currencyapi.com/v3/official/range \
    -d source=ecb \
    -d date_from=2026-09-01 \
    -d date_to=2026-09-30 \
    -d currencies=USD \
    -H "apikey: YOUR-API-KEY"

{
    "meta": {
        "source": "ecb",
        "base_currency": "EUR",
        "source_base_currency": "EUR",
        "cross_rates": false
    },
    "data": [
        {
            "date": "2026-09-25",
            "reference": null,
            "currencies": {
                "USD": {
                    "code": "USD",
                    "value": 1.1403
                }
            }
        },
        {
            "date": "2026-09-28",
            "reference": null,
            "currencies": {
                "USD": {
                    "code": "USD",
                    "value": 1.1378
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

curl -G https://api.currencyapi.com/v3/official/sources \
    -H "apikey: YOUR-API-KEY"

{
    "data": {
        "ecb": {
            "code": "ecb",
            "name": "European Central Bank",
            "country": "EU",
            "region": "europe",
            "base_currency": "EUR",
            "rate_type": "Euro foreign exchange reference rates",
            "schedule": "Every TARGET2 business day at around 16:00 CET",
            "website": "https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/euro_reference_exchange_rates/html/index.en.html",
            "history": {
                "from": "1999-01-04",
                "to": "2026-09-28"
            },
            "currencies": ["AUD", "BRL", "CAD", "..."]
        },
        "...": "34 more central banks"
    }
}

Finding a source for a currency

/v3/official/sources?currency=KZT lists every bank that publishes a rate for the tenge (and the National Bank of Kazakhstan, which publishes against it). Add region=asia (or europe, africa, north-america, south-america, oceania) to narrow it down. The endpoint is free: it never counts against your quota.

CSV and caching

• CSV. Add format=csv to /v3/official or /v3/official/range for one row per currency and publication: date,source,base_currency,currency,value,reference. Values never use exponent notation, so Excel and Google Sheets read them as numbers.
• Conditional requests. Every response carries an ETag. Send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged response comes back as 304 Not Modified without a body. Cache-Control tells you how long a response stays current: 5 minutes for recent publications, a day for settled ones.

Errors

Errors carry a stable, machine-readable error.code next to the human-readable message, and actions with links to the next step.

{
    "message": "European Central Bank published no official rates on 1998-06-01 or in the 14 days before it.",
    "error": {
        "code": "no_rates_published",
        "message": "European Central Bank published no official rates on 1998-06-01 or in the 14 days before it."
    },
    "actions": {
        "sources": "https://api.currencyapi.com/v3/official/sources",
        "docs": "https://currencyapi.com/docs/openapi.yaml"
    },
    "info": "For more information, see documentation: https://currencyapi.com/docs/official"
}

See Request Status Codes for the errors every endpoint shares.