Cost analysis tool
Your receipt never shows the margin. Enter what you paid and what you received, and this tool reconstructs it from the real mid-market rate published for that day — then tells you what a fair provider would have charged instead.
Enter your figures and the result updates as you type.
Breakdown
| Measure | Value | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-market rate that day | — | The benchmark nobody quite gives you |
| Effective rate you got | — | Received divided by paid |
| Amount you should have received | — | At the mid-market rate, before any margin |
| Amount actually received | — | What landed in the account |
| Shortfall | — | The margin cost of this single transaction |
| Cost if repeated at your chosen frequency | — | The same mistake, multiplied over a year |
Comparison
Benchmark margins below are typical published retail ranges for major currency pairs, expressed as total cost. Your own provider will differ, but the ranking is stable almost everywhere.
| Route | Typical total cost | You would have received | Difference vs what you got |
|---|
A retailer issuing an invoice has to show tax. A currency exchange is under no equivalent obligation to show its margin, and the industry has organised itself around that. The price you see is presented as a rate, which feels like a fact about the world rather than a quote someone chose. Nothing on a bureau de change receipt compares that rate with anything else, so there is no moment where the customer can see the size of the gap.
The gap itself has a consistent structure. On any exchange there are effectively two prices: the mid-market rate, which is the midpoint of interbank buying and selling, and the rate offered to you. Everything your provider earns sits between them, sometimes split into a visible fee and an invisible margin, sometimes folded entirely into the rate. Advertisements that promise zero commission are not lying about the fee; they are silent about the margin, and the margin is almost always the larger number.
Once you can measure it, the whole category changes character. A 0.4 percent margin on a monthly transfer is a rounding error you can rationally ignore. A 6 percent margin on the same transfer is a car payment, and it is worth twenty minutes of your life to eliminate. Most people are somewhere in between without knowing which.
Take the margin figure to your provider and ask one direct question: can you match or beat a total cost of X percent? Providers hold discretion on margins far more often than customers assume, particularly on recurring transfers and larger amounts, and the conversation costs nothing. If they will not move, the benchmark table above tells you which route class to move to instead.
For past transactions, note that in many jurisdictions a card or payment provider will reverse dynamic currency conversion or waive a fee if you raise it promptly. That is easier to argue with a number in hand than with a feeling that the rate looked poor.
Three figures are enough: the amount debited from you, the amount credited or handed to you, and the date. Everything else on the paperwork is presentation. If your receipt only shows your home currency, the merchant or terminal applied dynamic currency conversion, and you were almost certainly charged more than paying in the local currency would have cost. The dynamic currency conversion guide explains why that happens, and the mid-market rate guide covers the benchmark in detail.
We look up the reference rate published for your transaction date, or the most recent business day before it if markets were closed. Reference rates are public, so the benchmark is verifiable rather than a figure we invent.
No. Even the cheapest consumer route adds something. Use the mid-market rate to measure how much your provider added, not as a target you should be able to hit.
Because the benchmark moves. A margin measured against Monday's rate is not comparable with one measured against Friday's, which is why this tool always anchors to the date you actually transacted.
Yes. Any exchange can be measured this way, whether it went through a wire, a card network, an airport counter or a hotel desk.
This tool is educational and is not financial advice. Reference rates are the published daily rates for each date; providers quote their own rates, and intraday moves mean the rate at the moment of your transaction can differ from the daily reference. The typical-cost figures in the comparison table are general retail ranges for major currency pairs and are not quotes from any specific provider. Check your provider's own disclosure for the exact terms that applied to you.