The number you googled is the mid-market rate
When you type a currency pair into a search engine, what you get back is the mid-market rate: the midpoint between the prices at which that currency is currently being bought and sold on the global market. It is the fairest available snapshot of what one currency is worth in another, and it moves continuously while markets are open.
What it is not is a price anyone will actually give you. The mid-market rate is where large institutions trade with each other, in large volumes, with no retail service wrapped around the deal. A customer converting a few hundred euros — at a counter, through an app, or by tapping a card — is buying a service, and the price of that service is built into, or added on top of, the rate.
That does not make the mid-market rate useless. Quite the opposite: because everyone can look it up, it is the honest yardstick. The distance between the mid-market rate and the rate you were actually given is the true cost of your conversion — whatever the fee line on your receipt says, including when it says zero.
Where the rate on your statement actually comes from
Banks do not all price currency the same way. Across the banks we track, applied rates come from three main places:
- The bank's own board. Many banks publish their own buy/sell table and update it on their own schedule — once a day, several times a day, or whenever they decide. The margin over the mid-market rate is already inside those numbers, and it is the bank's to set.
- The card network's rate. For card payments, many banks do not set a rate at all. They pass through the daily conversion rate of the card network — Visa or Mastercard — and add their own foreign-transaction fee on top, a percentage they publish in their fee document. Two banks issuing cards on the same network can convert at the same rate and still cost you very different amounts, purely because of that fee.
- A reference rate plus a disclosed margin. Some banks and most newer fintechs convert at an official reference rate — the European Central Bank's, for example — plus a stated percentage. This is the most transparent model, because the two ingredients are published separately and you can check both.
Some banks tell you clearly which model they use. Others publish nothing at all. When we show a bank in our live comparison, we label where each rate comes from — the bank's board, the card network, or a reference rate plus its margin — and when a bank does not publish its pricing, we say "not published" rather than inventing a number. That distinction matters more than it sounds: a rate you cannot trace is a rate you cannot compare.
Spreads and fixed fees are two different costs
A fee is visible: it appears as its own line on your statement, as a percentage or a fixed amount. A spread is not: it lives inside the exchange rate itself, so the conversion simply produces less money than the mid-market rate would have, with nothing labelled as a charge.
A deliberately made-up illustration: say the mid-market rate would turn your 1,000 into 920 of the other currency, and the rate you are offered turns it into 890. No fee appears anywhere — yet the conversion cost you 30, roughly 3%. That gap is the spread.
This is why "0% commission" is not the same as free, and why the only comparison that always works is the simplest one: how much of the other currency do you end up with? A generous-looking rate with a fixed fee stacked on top can beat a "commission-free" conversion at a wide rate — or lose to it — depending on the amount. Small transfers are hit hardest by fixed fees; large ones are hit hardest by spreads.
One bank, four different prices: cash, transfer, card, ATM
The same bank usually applies a different price to each way of touching a foreign currency. They are genuinely four products:
- Cash over the counter is typically priced from the bank's own cash board, and cash boards tend to carry the widest spreads — physical currency has to be stocked, insured and transported, and boards are updated on the bank's schedule, not the market's.
- Transfers often use a different rate than cash from the very same bank, and may add a fixed sending fee on top. Some banks price transfers off a reference rate plus a margin; others use their own transfer board. We've gathered what banks publish about this in our transfer fee checker.
- Card payments usually combine the card network's rate with the bank's own foreign-transaction fee. The fee is the part that varies most between banks in the same country — you can look yours up in the card fee checker.
- ATM withdrawals convert like a card payment, but flat withdrawal fees — from your bank, from the ATM's operator, or both — can stack on top. And ATMs are where dynamic currency conversion lives: if a machine or terminal offers to charge you in your home currency, the conversion is done by the terminal's provider at a margin of its own choosing. EU rules require card DCC offers to disclose that margin over the ECB reference rate — which is exactly why the disclosed comparison so often looks unflattering. Choosing the local currency keeps the conversion with your own bank, under the pricing it publishes.
So "what rate does my bank apply?" has no single answer. The useful question is: what does my bank apply to the thing I am about to do?
How to find what your bank actually applies
The good news is that most of this is published — in rate boards, price lists and fee documents. The bad news is that it is scattered across hundreds of bank websites and PDFs. That is the gap this site exists to close. We collect the rates and fees banks themselves publish, label where each number comes from, and refuse to fill the gaps with estimates.
Pick your country and a currency, and see the rates the banks around you are applying today — side by side, cheapest first, each one labelled with its source: the bank's own board, the card network, or a reference rate plus the bank's published margin.
From there, three shortcuts depending on what you are about to do:
- Paying by card abroad? The card fee checker shows the foreign-transaction fee your bank publishes for card payments, and which banks in your country charge 0%.
- Sending money? The transfer fee checker shows what banks disclose about their transfer margins — and is honest about the ones that disclose nothing.
- Just curious how your bank compares over time? The by-bank pages break down each bank's pricing, and the weekly reports track how the gap between the cheapest and most expensive banks in each country evolves.
The three-second check before any conversion
Before you exchange cash, send a transfer or tap your card in another currency, it comes down to three questions. What is the mid-market rate right now — the yardstick? What rate and fee will my bank apply to this method — the price? And is another bank I could reasonably use meaningfully cheaper — the alternative? The first answer is one search away. This site exists so the second and third are too.