About the AUD/SOS rate
The AUD/SOS rate is how many SOS 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/SOS rate history.
Reading the same rate from the other side: the reverse rate, SOS → AUD, is on the receiving Somali shilling view, and sending Australian dollars to Somalia is covered on the AUD → SOS 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.
Why Somalia has no new banknotes
The Central Bank of Somalia stopped issuing legal-tender banknotes when the state collapsed in 1991, and the World Bank's assessment is that essentially the whole stock now circulating is counterfeit. The Bank was re-established under a Central Bank Act in 2012, having, in its own words, ceased to function after 1991.
A replacement has been designed in some detail. The first phase would exchange the circulating notes for four new low denominations of 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 and 10,000 shillings, printing 752.5 million notes against a total of 1,750 billion shillings to be exchanged, at a budgeted cost of US$41.26 million that the World Bank later costed at US$55 million for the project as a whole. The International Monetary Fund's assessment letter of March 2018 recorded that the new notes would mark the first time the central bank had issued currency since 1991.
By the Fund's third programme review in July 2025 the exchange still had not happened, and it had been folded into a larger project: adopting a currency board arrangement, with amendments to the central bank law due before Parliament at the end of December 2025 and a currency board balance sheet to be published by the end of July 2026.
Meanwhile the money moves without the shilling. Mobile money has become the dominant retail payment system, and money transfer businesses remain critical for international flows, private and public alike, reaching into rural areas. Those businesses are written into the exchange plan itself, with a budget line for engaging them on distribution and collection. The shilling's surviving role is at the smallest end of the economy, in livestock and fishery trade and among street vendors and food sellers; when the World Bank surveyed Somalis in 2017, almost 90 per cent said they wanted mobile money available in the local currency.
Sources: World Bank, Somalia Currency Exchange Project (P172057) concept project information document · International Monetary Fund, Somalia currency reform assessment letter for the Central Bank of Somalia, 16 March 2018 · International Monetary Fund, Somalia third review under the Extended Credit Facility (Country Report No. 25/191) · Central Bank of Somalia, history