About the AUD/STN rate
The AUD/STN rate is how many STN 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/STN rate history.
Reading the same rate from the other side: the reverse rate, STN → AUD, is on the receiving São Tomé and Príncipe dobra view, and sending Australian dollars to São Tomé and Príncipe is covered on the AUD → STN 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.
How Sao Tome and Principe retires and issues a dobra
A withdrawn dobra note stops being legal tender and stays redeemable for five more years. Article 15 of the Banco Central de Sao Tome e Principe's organic law gives the Bank the job of fixing the exchange period for any note or coin being taken out of circulation and announcing it publicly. Once that period ends the notes lose their discharging power and are excluded from circulation, and the article then imposes a separate obligation on the Bank to go on receiving and paying them until five years have passed. The law it sits in is new: Lei n.º 03/2025, published in the Diario da Republica on 5 June 2025, replaces the 1992 statute that created the Bank in place of the Banco Nacional de Sao Tome e Principe, and its preamble gives the reason as more than three decades without an update.
The notes that clock now applies to arrived in 2018, three zeros lighter. The Bank's own account of the reform records Decreto-Lei n.º 6/2016 giving it full powers to issue a new family and Decreto-Lei n.º 11/2016 setting the conversion between the two at a thousand units, so one thousand old dobras became one new dobra.
That family is six notes and five coins, and the Bank set out what each is made of. The five and ten dobra notes are polymer; the twenty, fifty, one hundred and two hundred are cotton fibre. The coins run ten, twenty and fifty centimos and one and two dobras, copper- and nickel-plated.
The right to issue any of it is exclusive and includes the commemoratives. Article 11 gives the Bank the sole power to issue notes and metal coins, commemorative ones among them, with legal tender and discharging power in the country, and provides that the discharging power of notes is unlimited while that of coins is whatever the instrument authorising their issue sets. Article 14 permits only Bank-issued notes and coins to circulate, save where a law or a Bank regulation expressly authorises foreign ones.
A note's design is a legislative act. Article 12 requires the types of notes and coins, their plates, prototypes and face values to be submitted by the Bank for Government approval, and those characteristics to be published in the Diario da Republica as a decreto-lei, with notes carrying the general issue date and the countersignatures of the Minister of Finance and the Governor.
Sources: Lei n.o 03/2025, Lei Organica do Banco Central de Sao Tome e Principe, Diario da Republica de Sao Tome e Principe, I Serie, N.o 28, 5 June 2025 · Banco Central de Sao Tome e Principe, Reforma Monetaria 2018: A Nova Familia da Dobra