About the AUD/LAK rate
The AUD/LAK rate is how many LAK 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/LAK rate history.
Related views of this rate: the reverse rate, LAK → AUD, is on the receiving Lao kip view, and sending Australian dollars to Laos is covered on the AUD → LAK 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 Lao law lets you hold, carry and convert
Take more than a certain amount of cash into Laos and the paperwork you collect at the border is what lets you take it out again. Article 32 of the Law on Foreign Exchange Management, promulgated by presidential decree in August 2022, allows a traveller to bring in cash up to an amount the Bank of the Lao PDR determines and requires anything above that to be declared to customs at the checkpoint in order to obtain certificate documents. Going the other way needs the Bank's approval above the determined amount, unless the traveller can present that certificate to customs on the way out.
Holding the currency, once it is in, is expressly permitted. Article 8 lets residents and non-residents hold foreign exchange from legal earnings, either in an account with a Lao commercial bank or as cash. Article 9 then separates holding from spending, requiring conversion into kip at a commercial bank before a domestic payment for goods, services, debt service, dividends or wages.
Companies have carried a heavier obligation since May 2024. The International Monetary Fund records that exporters must repatriate their foreign-currency proceeds and sell a portion to commercial banks, which must in turn sell thirty per cent of those receipts to the central bank, and it classifies the requirement as a capital flow management measure. The Fund notes that the Bank submitted its first review of the measure's effectiveness to the Prime Minister in July 2025.
One further restriction turns on a document from an unrelated part of government. The Fund records that Laos maintains an exchange restriction subject to Fund approval which arises from a tax clearance certificate requirement: foreign currency for certain current international transactions cannot be obtained without one, and the Fund states that the taxes it covers are unrelated to the underlying transaction.
Article 33 states the regime the rest of it sits inside. Laos applies a market-based foreign exchange system supervised by the Government, with the Bank defining a reference rate on a periodical basis and holding the right to determine which foreign currencies may be used or traded.
Sources: Law on Foreign Exchange Management (Amended), No. 15/NA of 7 July 2022, promulgated by Decree of the President No. 104/PO of 19 August 2022 (Bank of the Lao PDR, unofficial English translation) · Bank of the Lao PDR, Legislation - Laws · International Monetary Fund, Lao PDR: 2025 Article IV Consultation (staff report dated 27 January 2026)