The interbank rate is the wholesale exchange rate at which large banks trade currencies with each other on the global market. Retail customers cannot access it directly; the rates offered to households and businesses are derived from it, with a margin added by the provider.
The interbank foreign-exchange market is a decentralised network of banks and dealers quoting prices to one another around the clock. Volumes are enormous and spreads between buy and sell prices are extremely thin, because participants trade in millions of dollars at a time.
The term is often used loosely to mean the mid-market rate, and in everyday conversation the two are close enough to be interchangeable. Strictly, the interbank market quotes a buy price and a sell price, and the mid-market rate is the midpoint of that pair.
Trading between reporting dealers, which is the interbank market proper, averaged 4.4 trillion US dollars a day in April 2025. The Bank for International Settlements counts the market every three years, and that is its latest figure. It is 46 per cent of total daily foreign-exchange turnover of 9.6 trillion, with other financial institutions at 50 per cent and non-financial customers at 5 per cent. Divide the inter-dealer figure evenly across a day and it comes to 183 billion US dollars an hour, or 3.1 billion a minute. Across all counterparty types, the Australian dollar sat on one side of 583 billion of that 9.6 trillion, a 6.1 per cent share. That is seventh in the survey’s currency table, behind the US dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound, the renminbi and the Swiss franc. Two currencies are involved in every trade, so those shares total 200 per cent rather than 100.
For anyone sending or converting money, the interbank rate matters as the origin of every retail quote: whatever rate you are offered started life as an interbank price before the provider adjusted it in its own favour.
Longer read: What the wholesale currency market is, and where a quoted rate comes from. Every rate anybody is quoted began as a price between institutions. Who those institutions are, how much they trade, why most of it is never visible, and what the two-day settlement convention means.
The practical companion to this definition is the currency converter pages.
Related terms
Mid-market rate · Spot rate · Exchange-rate margin · All terms
Primary authority: RBA exchange-rate statistics. Definition reviewed against the authority’s published material; this page is reference information, not advice.
Common questions
Is the interbank rate the same as the mid-market rate?
Nearly. The interbank market quotes a buy and a sell price; the mid-market rate is the midpoint between them. In retail contexts the terms are used interchangeably, and both describe a wholesale benchmark no consumer can transact at directly.
Why can’t individuals get the interbank rate?
Interbank pricing exists for institutions trading in very large volumes with each other. Retail providers buy currency at close to those prices, then quote customers a rate that includes a margin covering their costs and profit.
Where can I see interbank rates?
Live wholesale quotes sit on professional trading platforms, but the practical public view is a mid-market feed or a central-bank reference series. For most purposes the published mid-market rate is the usable proxy for interbank pricing.