About the AUD/SSP rate
The AUD/SSP rate is how many SSP 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/SSP rate history.
The other directions of this rate: the reverse rate, SSP → AUD, is on the receiving South Sudanese pound view, and sending Australian dollars to South Sudan is covered on the AUD → SSP 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.
The exchange rate South Sudan planned and the one it got
The currency arrived almost immediately after the country did. South Sudan became independent on 9 July 2011, and the Bank of South Sudan introduced the pound on 18 July, replacing the Sudanese pound. The Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, speaking at the launch in Juba, remarked on a new state introducing a new currency barely ten days after independence.
There was a written plan for what to do next. The International Monetary Fund records that under the central bank law the authorities were expected to let the currency float for a period of up to six months beginning in July 2011, and then peg it at a sustainable level against the US dollar.
That timetable did not survive its own first quarter. The Fund's account is that a parallel market emerged in September 2011, when the central bank decided to peg the currency at an overvalued level and ration foreign exchange. The peg it settled on held from September 2011 until December 2015, when the authorities switched to a de jure floating system with a view to eliminating the parallel market, and the Fund reclassified the arrangement from a conventional peg with effect from 15 December 2015. Nine years later the Fund's Executive Board was still welcoming gradual adjustment of the official rate to narrow the gap with the parallel market and pressing for the two to be unified.
Underneath the regime question is an unusually direct fiscal mechanism. On the Fund's 2023 Article IV figures, oil accounts for close to 90 per cent of government revenue and 95 per cent of exports, and about 95 per cent of revenues are denominated in foreign currency while the state spends in pounds. That ties the currency to the pipeline: when exports fell to roughly a third of their previous level after damage in February 2024 to the line carrying 70 per cent of production through Sudan, the shortfall arrived as a currency problem as much as a budget one. The currency's name changed too, from the South Sudanese pound to the South Sudan pound, by an amendment in 2023.
Sources: Bank of South Sudan, bank notes and legal tender · BIS Review, address by the Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya at the launch of South Sudan's currency, 18 July 2011 · International Monetary Fund, South Sudan 2014 Article IV Consultation (Country Report No. 14/345) · International Monetary Fund, South Sudan 2016 Article IV Consultation (Country Report No. 17/73) · International Monetary Fund, South Sudan 2023 Article IV Consultation (Country Report No. 24/160) · International Monetary Fund, South Sudan third review under the programme monitored by the Board (Country Report No. 24/327)