About the AUD/WST rate
The AUD/WST rate is how many WST 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/WST rate history.
The other directions of this rate: the reverse rate, WST → AUD, is on the receiving Samoan tālā view, and sending Australian dollars to Samoa is covered on the AUD → WST 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.
What the Central Bank of Samoa still has to approve
Samoa is one of a shrinking number of places that still operates exchange control in the original sense: a system where the question is not how much you may move but whether you have permission to move it. The Central Bank of Samoa administers it under the Central Bank of Samoa Act 2015 and the Exchange Control Regulation 1999, and foreign currency may be bought and sold only through licensed authorised dealers - four banks together with a listed set of money transfer operators and a money changer.
The asymmetry in the rules follows the direction the money actually flows. A member of the public may sell foreign notes without limit, but may only buy them for overseas travel and on supporting documents. Foreign notes hand-carried out above the equivalent of 20,000 tala per person require the Bank's prior approval, on top of the declaration made on the border form. Capital-account transactions need prior approval as a class, and a resident wanting to open a foreign currency deposit account needs approval for that too - with cash specifically not accepted as a source of funding for one.
The reason a country of this size sustains that apparatus is visible in one statistic. World Bank figures put personal remittances received at 22.37 per cent of Samoa's gross domestic product in 2025 and 24.01 per cent in 2024, having peaked at 31.47 per cent in 2022, against 15 to 17 per cent through the late 2010s. An economy where roughly a quarter of national income arrives as transfers from relatives abroad has an unusually direct interest in where foreign currency goes once it lands.
The rate itself is set against a basket of four currencies, and the Australian dollar is one of them - so an Australian converting into tala is buying a unit partly defined by the currency being sold. The Bank fixes the tala against the US dollar each morning from the basket's weightings, communicates it to the commercial banks by nine o'clock, and reviews the weightings annually.
Sources: Central Bank of Samoa, foreign exchange controls information booklet · Central Bank of Samoa, fact sheet on the Samoan tala exchange rate · World Bank, personal remittances received as a share of GDP