How to read Indian bank forex rates

Last updated 04 August 2026

Why these rates are not directly comparable as published

All seven banks publish a daily foreign-exchange sheet, but each uses a different column order, a different set of rate types, and in one case a different quoting unit. Read side by side without normalising, they will mislead you. This page explains what each column means, which banks quote for which transaction sizes, and where the comparison stops being apples-to-apples.

Reading the columns

The direction is the thing people get wrong, because the labels describe what the bank does, not what you do:

TT Buy — the bank buys foreign currency from you. This is the rate for an inward remittance: money arriving from abroad into your Indian account. Higher is better for you.
TT Sell — the bank sells foreign currency to you. This is the rate for an outward remittance: sending money abroad, tuition fees, family support. Lower is better for you.
Card Buy / Card Sell — a forex travel card. Card Sell is loading the card; Card Buy is cashing out an unused balance.
Notes Buy / Notes Sell — physical currency notes over the counter. Always the widest spread of any column, on every bank's sheet.
Bill Buy / Bill Sell — trade documents and cheques. Not retail transfers; ignore these unless you are settling an export or import bill.

"TT" is a telegraphic transfer — the old name for a wire, still used across Indian bank documentation.

The sheets do not all cover the same transaction size

This is the single biggest trap in comparing them, and it is easy to miss because only one bank prints the limit prominently.

Bank	Its sheet applies to
State Bank of India	Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh, described on the sheet itself as "to be used as reference rates". Below Rs 10 lakh, SBI directs you to a branch.
HDFC Bank	Retail and trade transactions up to Rs 20 lakh equivalent
Axis Bank	Up to Rs 25 lakh
ICICI Bank	Up to USD 25,000 or equivalent
Bank of Baroda, Indian Overseas Bank, Canara Bank	No transaction band published

SBI is the only one with a floor. Everyone else publishes a ceiling, which still includes ordinary retail amounts. So SBI's unusually tight spread is a wholesale quote and not what a small remittance receives. Wherever SBI wins a column on the comparison page, that caveat is shown next to the figure.

Why some banks show much wider spreads

On USD, HDFC and Axis typically show a buy/sell spread around 3.3 rupees, while SBI, Bank of Baroda, IOB and Canara show roughly 0.6 to 0.9. That is not an error and it does not mean the public-sector banks will fill your transaction three rupees better.

HDFC and Axis publish retail card-rate sheets — the rates a walk-in customer gets. The others publish treasury sheets, closer to interbank, which a retail customer generally cannot transact at without size and a relationship. Compare within a category, not across.

The quoting-unit trap

Six of the seven quote the Japanese yen per 100 units. HDFC quotes it per single unit, so its sheet shows roughly 0.58 where the others show 58. SBI additionally quotes Thai baht and Korean won per 100. Indian Overseas Bank is the only bank that prints an explicit unit column.

Everything on this site is normalised to a per-single-unit value internally, then displayed per 100 for yen, baht and won so the columns line up. The currency converter applies the per-unit value, which is why 1,000 yen converts to a few hundred rupees rather than tens of thousands.

Caveats worth taking seriously

These are indicative rates. Every bank says so on its own sheet. The rate actually applied is the one prevailing at the moment your 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 rate difference between banks. A bank that looks 0.4 rupees better can easily be worse overall.
Banks revise intraday. Sheets are republished during the day at each bank's discretion. Axis and ICICI in particular update more than once.
Publication times differ. Early in the morning some banks still serve the previous working day's sheet. Each bank's timestamp is shown on the comparison, and anything not stamped today is flagged.
Weekends and holidays. Banks publish on foreign-exchange working days only, so a Sunday reading shows Friday's numbers.
Nothing here is financial advice. Verify with the bank before transacting.

Sources — every figure comes from the bank's own sheet

No aggregator sites are used. Each bank name on the comparison table links directly to the sheet its numbers were read from, and the timestamps below are the ones printed by the banks themselves.

Bank	Published at	As of	Applies to
State Bank of India	source sheet	not fetched	Rs 10-20 lakh band; SBI labels it a reference rate. Below Rs 10 lakh, SBI directs you to a branch.
Bank of Baroda	source sheet	not fetched	no transaction band published
Indian Overseas Bank	source sheet	not fetched	no transaction band published
ICICI Bank	source sheet	not fetched	up to USD 25,000 or equivalent
HDFC Bank	source sheet	not fetched	retail & trade up to Rs 20 lakh equivalent
Axis Bank	source sheet	not fetched	up to Rs 25 lakh
Canara Bank	source sheet	not fetched	no transaction band published

Collected automatically several times a day. Banks change their page layouts and file formats without notice, which can make a figure missing or stale; problems are corrected when found. Questions or a correction: contact@indiaforexrates.live.