The live mid-market AUD→WST rate and what it means for a transfer to Samoa. We explain the process; we never recommend a provider.
| You send (AUD) | Mid-market equivalent (WST) |
|---|---|
| 500 AUD | 965 WST |
| 1,000 AUD | 1,930 WST |
| 2,000 AUD | 3,859 WST |
| 5,000 AUD | 9,649 WST |
These are mid-market equivalents, not transfer quotes - a provider deducts its exchange-rate margin and any fee from these figures. STRUCK 11:00 AEST · TUE 13 OCT.
A continent pretending to be a country - Australia is the only nation that fills an entire continent, with most of its 27 million people clinging to the coast while the red-dirt interior does its own thing.
A blue field with the Union Jack in the canton, a large white seven-pointed Commonwealth Star below it, and the five white stars of the Southern Cross at the fly. Six of the big star's points stand for the states and the seventh for the territories; the Southern Cross marks Australia's place in the southern sky.
A Polynesian nation in the South Pacific, Samoa jumped across the International Date Line in 2011, skipping a whole day to better align its calendar with trading partners like Australia and New Zealand.
A red field with a blue canton bearing five white stars. The Schedule to the Official Flag and National Anthem of Samoa Act 1994 prescribes the flag in geometric detail, down to the vertical and horizontal units fixing the size and position of every star, and the one thing it interprets is the stars, which it names as representing the Southern Cross. It assigns the colours no meaning, and neither does the constitution. The government's own account of the country reads the red as courage and as a traditional Samoan colour, says the blue is taken to represent freedom, and gives the white no meaning of its own.
Established Samoan communities in Australia and New Zealand keep this route busy all year, and sending tends to be frequent and small rather than occasional and large, so fixed per-transfer costs bite harder here than they would on a single big send. The tālā is guided by a currency basket in which the Australian dollar features.
Australia’s exchange controls went with the float. A Reserve Bank research paper dates their abolition to the December 1983 decision that ended the crawling peg and opened the country to capital moving in both directions. Sanctions are a separate matter and do still apply. Targeted financial sanctions prohibit making assets available to designated persons and entities, and the Australian Sanctions Office within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade maintains the Consolidated List that names them. The other requirement sits with the provider rather than the sender. Before it carries out a first transfer the provider must complete customer identification: collect identifying information, then verify it against reliable and independent documents or electronic data. That is the request for identity documents a first-time sender meets before anything can be sent.
The report that follows is the provider’s, not yours. A reporting entity must lodge an international funds transfer instruction report with AUSTRAC for a transfer of any value into or out of Australia, within ten business days of the instruction. There is no amount below which one is not filed, and on a transfer sent through a provider there is nothing for the sender to lodge. What is left to a sender is timing and route. The banking day that decides when money lands is the destination’s, not Australia’s, and Australian business hours run ahead of nearly every country on this list: Monday morning in Sydney is still Sunday in the Americas. The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures records that payments reaching a beneficiary country outside its operating hours stall until the system reopens. Route matters as much as the hour. A payment may pass through correspondent banks on its way, or through a provider that operates in both countries and, the Reserve Bank notes, avoids some of the costs of that intermediation.
Related pages on this corridor: the WST → AUD page covers the opposite direction, the AUD/WST converter page has amount conversion and history, and the currency converter handles any amount. On the other end of this transfer? The receiver’s view covers what arrives and what to check.
How much Samoan tālā will the recipient actually get?
A little less than the mid-market figures on this page. Providers apply their own exchange rate (the mid-market rate minus a margin) and usually a transfer fee, so the amount that arrives in Samoa depends on both. Comparing a provider's quote against the mid-market rate shown here reveals the real cost.
Is there a best day to send money to Samoa?
Rates move constantly and Tradergy doesn't forecast them. What you can control is the cost of the transfer itself: the gap between the quoted rate and the mid-market rate, plus any fees.
Why is my provider’s rate worse than this one?
No retail provider transacts at the mid-market rate - it is the midpoint of the wholesale market. What separates it from a quoted rate is margin, and margin is normally a larger cost than any advertised fee.