About the AUD/XOF rate
The AUD/XOF rate is how many XOF 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/XOF rate history.
Reading the same rate from the other side: the reverse rate, XOF → AUD, is on the receiving West African CFA franc view, and sending Australian dollars to the West African CFA franc zone is covered on the AUD → XOF 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 there is no offshore market in these notes, and the one exception a traveller gets
One currency serves eight countries here. The BCEAO issues the West African CFA franc for Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo, at a parity of 655.957 francs to the euro that has stood since the CFA franc was pegged to the euro in 1999. The French Treasury, which guarantees unlimited convertibility of the currency, publishes the same parity and describes its own undertaking as supplying the euros needed should an external shock leave the states unable to pay for imports.
The notes themselves are legally confined to the union. Article 53 of Annexe II to Règlement n°06/2024/CM/UEMOA, adopted at Bamako on 20 December 2024, prohibits any resident other than the BCEAO from sending or receiving banknotes and coins issued by the BCEAO to or from banking or commercial correspondents located outside the member states, and article 55 of the same annexe provides that an account opened for a non-resident cannot be funded with those notes at all. Article 3 of the Regulation itself leaves capital movements between member states free and without any restriction, so the confinement is to the union rather than to any one country in it.
One door is left open, and the figure behind it is not in the Regulation. The last paragraph of that article 53 permits a resident traveller bound for a state outside the union to carry CFA franc notes and coins physically, up to a ceiling the BCEAO sets, and the Regulation hands the central bank every other traveller figure the same way. The BCEAO set them in Instruction n°06/07/2025/RFE, signed at Dakar on 7 July 2025 and in force from 1 August 2025: five hundred thousand francs of CFA notes and coins per person leaving for a non-member state, a declaration by a resident once the foreign cash carried exceeds three million francs, and a written declaration by a non-resident, on entry and on exit, above five hundred thousand.
What changed recently is the institutional half of the arrangement. The BCEAO's announcement of 21 December 2019 recorded three reforms: renaming the currency the eco on the members' entry into the ECOWAS eco zone, ending the centralisation of foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury and closing the operations account, and withdrawing French representatives from the union's decision-making bodies. The French Treasury confirms the BCEAO has had no operations account with it since January 2020, while its Central African counterpart still deposits half its reserves.
The renaming has not happened. At its session of 14 December 2025 the ECOWAS Authority recorded concern about members' convergence performance with less than two years before the launch of the eco, and about delays in the roadmap for it.
Sources: BCEAO, history of the CFA franc · Règlement n°06/2024/CM/UEMOA on the external financial relations of the UEMOA member states, Bamako, 20 December 2024 · Annexes to Règlement n°06/2024/CM/UEMOA - Annexe II, article 53 on banknote movements and article 55 on non-resident accounts · BCEAO, Instruction n°06/07/2025/RFE on foreign exchange allocations to travellers and the control of means of payment they carry · BCEAO, press release on the reform of the CFA franc · Direction générale du Trésor, the principles and operation of monetary cooperation · ECOWAS, final communique of the sixty-eighth ordinary session, 14 December 2025