The pairs other converters skip
Most currency converters carry the two or three dozen currencies with the highest search volume and stop there. That covers the euro, the pound and the yen, and leaves you stuck the moment you need something else — sending money to family in Kazakhstan, pricing goods in Papua New Guinea, working with offshore yuan rather than onshore.
The usual workaround is to convert twice: your currency to dollars, then dollars to the target. That works, but it is two lookups, two roundings, and an easy place to make a mistake. This converter carries every currency the rate feed publishes — over 160 — and does the cross rate in one step.
How a cross rate works
Every rate in the feed is quoted against the US dollar. To get a rate between two other currencies, you divide one by the other.
Say 1 USD buys 474.7 KZT and 1 USD buys 65.7 AFN. Then one tenge is worth 65.7 ÷ 474.7 = 0.1384 afghani, and 650,000 tenge is about 89,900 afghani. Going through the dollar like this is the standard method — it is how the feed itself is constructed, and it is what any converter does internally whether or not it says so.
One consequence worth knowing: a cross rate inherits the error of both legs. For heavily traded pairs that is negligible. For two thinly traded currencies, the mid-market cross rate can sit some distance from what anyone will actually transact at, because there may be no direct market between them at all.
Mid-market is not what you pay
The rate here is the midpoint between the buying and selling price in the wholesale market. Nobody offers it to retail customers. What you actually get depends on how you exchange:
- Card payments abroad — usually the closest to mid-market, roughly 1% away once the network and issuer margins are counted. Decline "pay in your home currency" offers at the terminal; that is dynamic currency conversion and it is consistently worse.
- Bank transfers — a spread plus a fixed fee. The fixed part matters most on small amounts.
- Cash at a counter — the widest spread, and airport counters are the worst almost everywhere. If you need cash on arrival, changing a small amount at the airport and the rest later is the usual compromise.
How current is this?
Rates are fetched once a day when the site is rebuilt and written directly into the page, which is why the numbers appear before any script runs. That makes them a daily reference, not a live feed. For a large transfer or anything time-sensitive, confirm with whoever is actually executing it.
The primary source is ExchangeRate-API. European Central Bank euro reference rates are used as a cross-check — note that the ECB publishes rates against the euro only, so any dollar pair derived from them is itself a cross rate.
What this converter assumes
- All rates are quoted per 1 USD · cross rate = target rate ÷ source rate
- Mid-market rates, updated once a day at build time
- No fees, spreads or commissions are applied — those depend on your provider
- Source: ExchangeRate-API · cross-check: ECB euro reference rates