About the AUD/YER rate
The AUD/YER rate is how many YER 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/YER rate history.
Related views of this rate: the reverse rate, YER → AUD, is on the receiving Yemeni rial view, and sending Australian dollars to Yemen is covered on the AUD → YER 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.
Money sent home, and why nobody knows how much
The World Bank's indicator series for personal remittances received by Yemen has no data for any year after 2016, when it last recorded 3.77 billion United States dollars. That decade-old figure is the last official measurement of the flow.
Estimates fill the gap and they diverge widely. ACAPS, the analysis unit hosted by the Norwegian Refugee Council, reported that estimates of the total value of remittances to Yemen in 2019 ranged from 3.8 billion to 8 billion United States dollars, and explained the spread directly: a high share has traditionally moved through informal hawala networks and is never recorded anywhere. A range whose upper end is more than double its lower end is not a measurement, and ACAPS says why it cannot be one.
Where it comes from is less uncertain than how much. ACAPS identifies Saudi Arabia as by far the largest source, and documents how the Saudi lockdown introduced in late March 2020 and eased in late June cut Yemeni migrant workers' ability to earn and to send. A flow concentrated in one labour market carries that market's shocks straight into Yemeni households.
The channel itself has since been disrupted from the other end. The New Humanitarian reported that after new United States sanctions in mid-January 2024 on Houthi-linked individuals and affiliated currency exchange companies, several Yemeni exchange houses, sanctioned and unsanctioned alike, stopped sending money into the country or allowing withdrawals, some acting out of an abundance of caution. Hawala was reported as largely unaffected and likely to absorb more of the traffic, within the limits of what it can practically carry.
Sources: World Bank, Personal remittances received, Yemen (indicators BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS and BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT) · ACAPS Yemen Analysis Hub, The impact of remittances on Yemen's economy, Thematic Report, 15 October 2021 · The New Humanitarian, New sanctions hit remittances, adding to economic hardships in Yemen, 3 April 2024