About us

What this site is

Seven Indian banks each publish a foreign-exchange rate sheet on their own website every working day. Reading them side by side is harder than it sounds: they use different column orders, different sets of rate types, different quoting units, and they publish at different times of the morning. This site collects all seven, normalises them into one comparable table, and shows what each bank charges over the official reference rate.

Nothing here comes from an aggregator or a data vendor. Every figure is read from the publishing bank's own sheet, and every bank name in the comparison links back to the exact document its numbers came from, so any figure can be checked at source.

Why it exists

Comparing bank forex rates in India means opening seven websites, finding seven differently laid-out sheets, working out which column applies to your transaction, and remembering that most of them quote the yen per hundred units while one does not. Doing that by hand before deciding where to send money is tedious enough that most people skip it and take whatever their own bank offers.

That gap is worth something. On a typical day the spread between the cheapest and dearest of these banks is more than a rupee per US dollar — roughly 0.02% against 1.4% over the official reference rate. On a modest transfer that is real money, and it stays invisible until somebody puts the sheets next to each other.

Who runs it

An independent site, built and maintained by one person as a side project. It is not operated by, affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any bank named on it, and it takes no payment, commission or placement fee from any of them. Bank names appear only to identify whose published sheet a figure came from.

It is not a bank, a money changer or an authorised dealer. It cannot exchange currency, act on a transfer, or access anyone's account. Running costs are covered by advertising, which has no bearing on the rankings — those come straight from the arithmetic.

The code is public at github.com/Alpha477/india-forex-rates, so everything described below can be inspected rather than taken on trust.

How the bank sheets are collected

An automated job runs six times across the Indian business day. For each bank it fetches that bank's own published sheet, by whichever method that bank requires:

• Four publish an HTML table — Bank of Baroda, Indian Overseas Bank, Axis Bank and Canara Bank serve the figures in the page itself, and they are read from the markup.
• Two publish a PDF — State Bank of India and HDFC Bank. Text is extracted from the document itself, not from a preview or a summary page.
• One needs a real browser — ICICI Bank builds its table with JavaScript after the page loads, so an ordinary request returns an empty shell. That page is rendered in a headless browser and read afterwards.

Normalising what comes back

The raw sheets are not comparable, and most of the work is making them so:

• Column order differs. Two banks print selling rates before buying rates while the others do the reverse. Getting that wrong silently swaps every buy and sell figure, so each bank's order is recorded explicitly and its page headings are re-checked on every run. A layout change is flagged rather than quietly absorbed.
• Quoting units differ. Most banks quote the Japanese yen per 100 units; one quotes it per single unit. Taken literally that makes one bank look a hundred times better. Everything is converted to a per-single-unit value internally and then shown in the conventional per-100 form for yen, baht and won. Indian Overseas Bank is the only bank that prints the multiple explicitly, and where a bank states it, the stated value is used rather than assumed.
• Rate types differ. Not every bank publishes forex-card or currency-note rates. Missing figures are shown blank, never filled in from a neighbouring column.

Freshness, and why it is not simply "today"

Each sheet carries the date the bank struck it, and that date — not when it was collected — decides what counts as current. A bank still serving yesterday's sheet at ten in the morning is labelled as such rather than passed off as today's, and the job keeps looking until the new one appears. This matters because they publish at genuinely different times: one has been seen replacing the previous day's PDF at 10:48 in the morning, and one is routinely a day behind.

Every collected sheet is archived, one record per bank per published day. That archive is what the history page is built from, and it only grows forward — a sheet from last week cannot be recovered once the bank replaces it.

The reference rates

Judging a bank's margin needs a neutral mid-market figure to measure against. Three sources are used, in order of authority for India:

• The Reserve Bank of India for the dollar, euro, pound, yen, dirham and rupiah — struck the same day, quoted directly against the rupee, with the unit stated in the row label so it is read rather than guessed.
• The European Central Bank for around two dozen more. It publishes in the late European afternoon, which is evening in India, so during an Indian morning its newest figure is the previous working day's. Each rate is shown with its own date rather than presented as current.
• Published central-bank pegs for several Gulf currencies neither of the above quotes. These are marked as derived.

Live interbank rates, of the kind a search engine displays, are deliberately not used. They come from licensed feeds that may not be republished, and a continuously moving number is the wrong yardstick for a sheet published once a day: it would report ordinary market drift as bank margin, and could not be archived or checked afterwards.

The seven sources

Each links to the document its figures are read from.

Live timestamps showing when each bank last published are on the guide.

What this site does not claim

• Every bank labels its own rates indicative, and so does this site. The rate actually applied is the one prevailing when an account is debited or credited.
• The comparison covers rates only. GST on the conversion, SWIFT and correspondent-bank charges, and card issuance or reload fees frequently exceed the difference between banks.
• The sheets do not all cover the same transaction size — one publishes a band with a minimum of several lakh rupees and calls it a reference rate. The guide sets out which, and why it changes the answer.
• Collection is automated and banks change their layouts without notice, so a figure can be missing or stale. Corrections are welcome and get looked at first: contact us.