About the AUD/AFN rate
The AUD/AFN rate is how many AFN one Australian dollar buys. It moves constantly with interest-rate expectations, commodity prices and global risk sentiment - see what moves the rate. Tradergy shows the mid-market reference rate and does not forecast where it’s heading. For the 52-week highs and lows and a daily table, see the AUD/AFN rate history.
Reading the same rate from the other side: the reverse rate, AFN → AUD, is on the receiving Afghan afghani view, and sending Australian dollars to Afghanistan is covered on the AUD → AFN transfer page. Every AUD pair sits on the convert hub, and to work in more than one currency at once there is the currency converter.
Where the afghani is actually traded
Afghanistan's currency market has a street address. Research published by CGAP and the World Bank in November 2024 describes Sarai Shahzada in Kabul, established in 1954 and housing 450 hawala shops, as the country's largest financial centre, trading in over thirty currencies and processing thousands of transactions daily. It is one of four large hawala markets in the capital, alongside Haidary, Hamadi and Hameedi.
The same research records that fewer than one in ten Afghan adults held a formal financial account before August 2021, and that hawala networks have since become the first and best option for many Afghans to reach financial services at all. Da Afghanistan Bank merged its foreign exchange dealer licence and its money service provider licence into a single category in 2022. The regulator followed the market it was regulating.
The central bank intervenes in that market directly, and it does so in cash. Da Afghanistan Bank runs open-market auctions selling United States dollar banknotes, funded from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, with money traders as the bidders.
How often it does so is harder to establish than it sounds. The Bank's own published auction results page carries nothing more recent than March 2022, so the running record of these operations is not something it maintains in public.
One further rule shapes what circulates alongside the afghani. Al Jazeera, reporting the announcement, recorded that on 2 November 2021 the authorities ordered citizens, shopkeepers, traders and businesses to transact only in afghanis and to refrain from using foreign currency, warning that violators would face legal action.
Sources: CGAP and the World Bank, Trust in Transition: Afghanistan's Hawala System in Crisis and Recovery, Working Paper, November 2024 · Da Afghanistan Bank, Market Operation Department · Da Afghanistan Bank, Currency Auction · Al Jazeera, Taliban bans the use of foreign currency across Afghanistan, 2 November 2021