About the AUD/CDF rate
The AUD/CDF rate is how many CDF 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/CDF rate history.
Reading the same rate from the other side: the reverse rate, CDF → AUD, is on the receiving Congolese franc view, and sending Australian dollars to the Democratic Republic of the Congo is covered on the AUD → CDF 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.
What the Congolese franc replaced, and why
One Congolese franc was defined as fourteen million zaires. The decree-law of 17 June 1998 that created the currency states its internal parity in a single line, fixing one franc at one hundred thousand nouveaux zaires and at fourteen million zaires respectively, so the unit arrived carrying the arithmetic of two earlier currencies on its face. Article 1 named it and gave it the symbol FC in capitals; article 2 divided it into one hundred centimes.
The decree's expose des motifs sets out what it was answering, and it is unusually direct for a monetary statute. It lists uncontrolled money issuance leading to hyperinflation, the breaking apart of the national monetary space, and the existence of exchange rates strongly disparate from one province to another. Among the objectives it names for the new unit are the easy settlement of transactions, the reunification of that monetary space, and the convenient transport of the monetary signs.
It gives a political reason alongside the economic ones. The same document records that the change of government on 17 May 1997 had altered the name of the country and of the issuing institution, and states that this necessarily implied a new name for the monetary unit, whose name was associated with the country's. The decree describes the renaming as an imperative in its own right.
The changeover was not immediate. Article 4 kept old zaire and nouveau zaire notes as legal tender with unlimited discharging power until 30 June 1999, so the two circulated alongside each other for twelve months from the decree's entry into force on 30 June 1998.
Higher denominations came much later. Radio Okapi reported the Banque Centrale du Congo releasing 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 franc notes to commercial banks on 2 July 2012 in a first injection, and recorded the Governor giving three reasons: the volume of banknotes being handled in the market, the worsening dollarisation of the economy, and the rising cost of manufacturing, importing and distributing notes.
Dollarisation is still the live question. The International Monetary Fund's 2024 Article IV consultation records its discussions with the authorities as centred on the appropriate policy mix in a dollarized economy, and records the authorities intending to take steps to limit that dollarisation, given how strongly exchange rate movements pass through into prices.
Sources: Decret-loi du 17 juin 1998 instituant une nouvelle unite monetaire en Republique democratique du Congo, Journal Officiel numero special du 30 juin 1998 · Radio Okapi, RDC: la Banque centrale lance les billets de 1 000, 5 000 et 10 000 francs congolais, 2 July 2012 · International Monetary Fund, Democratic Republic of the Congo: 2024 Article IV Consultation, Country Report No. 24/226