About the AUD/TOP rate
The AUD/TOP rate is how many TOP 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/TOP rate history.
Where else this pair appears: the reverse rate, TOP → AUD, is on the receiving Tongan paʻanga view, and sending Australian dollars to Tonga is covered on the AUD → TOP 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 Tonga sets its own exchange rate
Each working day the Reserve Bank of Tonga decides what the paʻanga is worth. It states that it sets the rate at which the currency is exchanged for foreign currencies daily, by reference to a weighted basket of the currencies of Tonga's major partners in foreign trade and in foreign receipts and payments, and that those daily rates generally form the basis of what the commercial banks then quote. Its power to do so comes from the National Reserve Bank of Tonga (Amendment) Act 2014, which lets it prescribe the regime for determining the external value of the currency in consultation with the Minister.
What the Bank does with the reserves follows from the same decision. It invests them in accordance with the weights of the currencies in the exchange rate basket used to calculate the paʻanga's rate, so the asset side of its balance sheet is arranged to match the liability it has undertaken to price. It names those reserves as held mainly in US, Australian and New Zealand dollars.
The composition and the weights themselves are not published. The Bank's public explanations refer to a basket of the currencies of its major trading partners and to movements depending on the currencies in the basket and their weights, without naming either.
The Australian connection behind those flows is measurable from this end. The 2021 Census counted 12,260 people in Australia born in Tonga, with a median age of 49, of whom 42.1 per cent were Australian citizens. Tonga's reserves stood at T$924.3 million at the end of June 2024, equal to 11.9 months of import cover against an International Monetary Fund optimal level of 7.3 months, and its 2023 banknote series introduced the first polymer notes the currency has had.
Sources: Reserve Bank of Tonga, Annual Report 2024 · Reserve Bank of Tonga, depreciation of the Tongan paʻanga · Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021 Census QuickStats, people in Australia born in Tonga