Last updated 06 August 2026
Open any Indian bank's daily foreign-exchange sheet and you are met with four or five pairs of numbers per currency, labelled TT, Bill, Card and Currency Notes. Which one applies to you depends entirely on how the money moves — and the labels describe what the bank does, not what you do, which is why they are so easily read backwards.
The single most useful thing to internalise: "buying" and "selling" are from the bank's point of view.
"TT" stands for telegraphic transfer, the historical name for a wire. Indian bank documentation still uses it, and in practice it means any electronic transfer where no physical instrument changes hands. It is the rate most people actually need.
Bill Buying and Bill Selling apply to trade instruments — export bills, import documents, cheques drawn abroad. They exist because a bank handling a document carries a delay and a collection risk that a wire does not, so the rate is a little worse than TT. Unless you are settling an export invoice or depositing a foreign cheque, these columns are not the ones to read.
An odd consequence worth knowing: on at least one major bank's sheet the forex-card columns are printed with values identical to the bill columns, row for row. That is what the bank publishes, not a transcription error — but it means the "card" rate on that sheet is effectively its bill rate.
Card Selling is the rate for loading a prepaid forex travel card; Card Buying is what you get back when you unload an unused balance. If you are buying a card for a trip, the number that matters is Card Selling, and you want it low.
Currency Notes — physical cash over the counter — carry the widest spread on every sheet, without exception. Banks are handling, insuring, transporting and eventually repatriating paper, and the rate reflects that. Expect notes to be meaningfully worse than TT for the same currency on the same day.
The gap between a bank's buying and selling rate for the same currency is its margin. Measured against the official reference rate, the difference between Indian banks is not marginal: on a single ordinary day, the cheapest of the seven banks tracked here sat about 0.02% above the reference rate for sending US dollars, while the dearest sat about 1.4% above. Same currency, same morning.
Two things make that comparison less simple than it looks, and both are easy to miss.
Not every sheet covers the same transaction size. One major bank publishes a band for transactions between roughly ten and twenty lakh rupees and describes the figures as reference rates, directing smaller amounts to a branch. Its spread looks extraordinarily tight because it is a wholesale quote — not something a small remittance receives.
Public-sector and private banks publish different kinds of sheet. Several publish treasury sheets, close to interbank, with spreads under a rupee on the dollar. Others publish retail card-rate sheets with spreads over three rupees. A narrower spread on paper does not automatically mean a better rate you can transact at; compare within a category.
You can see all of these side by side across seven banks on the rate comparison, and what each bank charges over the official mid-market figure on the reference rates page.
One caveat that applies to every column: the rate is not the whole cost. Fees, GST and TCS frequently exceed the difference between banks.