About the AUD/MOP rate
The AUD/MOP rate is how many MOP 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/MOP rate history.
Related views of this rate: the reverse rate, MOP → AUD, is on the receiving Macanese pataca view, and sending Australian dollars to Macau is covered on the AUD → MOP 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.
Who issues the pataca, and what stands behind it
Two commercial banks issue Macau's banknotes. The International Monetary Fund describes the mechanism in its Fund Relations annex: the two banks deliver Hong Kong dollars to the Autoridade Monetaria de Macau and receive in return non-interest-bearing certificates of indebtedness, which serve as the backing for the notes they then put into circulation. Those Hong Kong dollars are counted in the Authority's official foreign exchange reserves.
The arrangement is a currency board and the Fund names it as one, in place since 1989, with the pataca one hundred per cent backed by foreign assets. What a note-issuing bank is really doing is exchanging one currency for the right to print another.
One of the two says so in its own accounts. Banco Nacional Ultramarino describes itself as one of the two banks responsible for issuing banknotes in Macau, records that the Macao SAR Government extended its agency agreement, and the Bank of China's, for a further ten years in 2020, and states in its accounting policies that the notes in circulation are secured by deposited funds currently held mainly in debt certificates issued by the Macao SAR Government. The bank has been in Macau since 1902 and says it has issued currency for over a hundred years.
The peg runs through Hong Kong. The Fund records the pataca formally delinked from the Portuguese escudo and linked to the Hong Kong dollar on 7 April 1977, a central rate set in January 1979 and adjusted in September 1983 to 1.03 patacas per Hong Kong dollar, where it has stayed.
Six note denominations circulate, from ten patacas to a thousand, alongside coins in avos and patacas.
Sources: International Monetary Fund, Macao SAR: Country Report No. 24/142, Informational Annex, Fund Relations · Banco Nacional Ultramarino, S.A., Annual Report 2023 · Macao Government Tourism Office, practical information