HMRC exchange rate lookup

Look up a rate for a currency and period

The lookup asks for three things — currency, period, and amount — and returns more than a number. Each result carries the rate, the period it applies to, the direction of the conversion, and the HMRC source for that period, because those are the fields that make the calculation defensible later.

The audit line matters more than the arithmetic. A converted figure sitting alone in a spreadsheet cell is a number nobody can check. The same figure with its original amount, original currency, rate, period, and source is a record a reviewer can verify without asking you anything. That is the difference between a conversion and evidence, and it costs nothing extra at the moment you do the conversion — only afterwards, when the context is gone.

HMRC publishes rates as currency units per £1, and this tool keeps that direction visible rather than silently inverting it. Converting a foreign-currency amount into GBP divides by the published rate; converting GBP into a foreign currency multiplies by it. Getting this backwards is one of the most common spreadsheet errors in expense conversion, and it is invisible in the result — which is exactly why the formula stays on screen.

What HMRC publishes, and when

HMRC’s own guidance on converting foreign currency amounts for customs value states that “we publish these rates at the end of every month and cover the period from the first to the last day of the next calendar month.” That single sentence carries the two facts a finance team needs: the rates are published in advance of the period they govern, and each set is fixed for a calendar month.

The Trade Tariff service — where the tables themselves are published — dates the cadence precisely: “Exchange rates are published by HMRC on the penultimate Thursday of every month (as per section 18 of Notices made under the Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Act 2018). These exchange rates apply to the following calendar month, and represent rates as of midday the day before publication.”

The same guidance sets out when the published rates are mandatory rather than optional in the customs context: importers should normally use the rate specified in their contract, and where no contract rate exists they may use a fixed rate or HMRC’s published rates — but “you must use the exchange rates published by us when the entry to free circulation is accepted.” It also notes that individual rates are amended during the month when commercial rates diverge from the published rate by more than 5%, which is why a month’s table is not always frozen from the first day to the last.

One piece of history saves a lot of confusion: the old GOV.UK collection of monthly rate files was withdrawn on 20 October 2023, and the rates moved to the Trade Tariff service, where monthly, average and spot rates are each published separately. Bookmarks and internal procedure documents written before that date frequently still point at the withdrawn collection. If your policy document names a URL, that is the first thing to check.

Monthly, average and spot rates are not interchangeable

HMRC publishes three different rate sets, and they answer three different questions. Choosing between them is a policy decision, not a technical one, and this page deliberately does not tell you which is legally correct for your filing — that depends on your tax, customs, and accounting context, and it is a question for your advisers.

What matters operationally is that your company picks one basis, writes it into the expense policy, and applies it the same way every month. A team that uses the monthly rate for most claims, the spot rate when someone remembers, and a bank rate when the claim came from a card statement does not have a conversion policy — it has three, and the reconciliation at close is the price.

The written policy should answer four questions: which rate set applies to employee expense claims; which date determines the period (the expense date, the submission date, or the approval date); when the rate is fixed and therefore stops moving; and who approves an exception when a claim genuinely needs a different basis. Those four answers are worth more than any calculator, because they are what makes every calculation reproducible.

This site tabulates the monthly rates only. Average and spot sets are published separately by HMRC through the same service and are not reproduced here.

Convert a batch of claims

Single conversions answer one question at a time; a month of expense claims is a different job. The bulk mode takes rows of amount, currency, date, and description, matches each row to the rate for its period, and returns a table with the converted value and the source fields alongside it.

The export deliberately includes the evidence columns by default. A CSV that contains only converted values recreates the original problem one step downstream: finance receives numbers whose provenance lives in whatever tool produced them, and a reviewer who wants to check one row has to reconstruct the whole calculation. Description, original currency, original amount, rate, period, converted value, and source URL together make each row self-explanatory.

Two practical notes on batch work. First, rows whose date falls outside the periods published here return no rate rather than a guess — a blank you can see is safer than an interpolated number you cannot. Second, the batch uses the period that contains each row’s date, so a claim dated the last day of a month and submitted on the first of the next converts on its own date’s period, not on the date you happened to run the export.

HMRC monthly rates for October 2026

The full published table for the current period, snapshotted on 2026-09-17. Every figure is currency units per £1. Verify against the HMRC source for this period before relying on a rate for anything consequential — HMRC amends individual rates mid-period when commercial rates diverge by more than 5%.

Rates by period

Every period below has its own page with the full published table, its period dates, the HMRC source, and the date the snapshot was taken. Periods with no distinct published data get no page at all.

• October 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-10-01 to 2026-10-31.
• September 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-09-01 to 2026-09-30.
• August 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31.
• July 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31.
• June 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-06-01 to 2026-06-30.
• May 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-05-01 to 2026-05-31.
• April 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-04-01 to 2026-04-30.
• March 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-03-01 to 2026-03-31.
• February 2026 — 163 currencies, 2026-02-01 to 2026-02-28.
• January 2026 — 164 currencies, 2026-01-01 to 2026-01-31.
• December 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-12-01 to 2025-12-31.
• November 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-11-01 to 2025-11-30.
• October 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-10-01 to 2025-10-31.
• September 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-09-01 to 2025-09-30.
• August 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-08-01 to 2025-08-31.
• July 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-07-01 to 2025-07-31.
• June 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-06-01 to 2025-06-30.
• May 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-05-01 to 2025-05-31.
• April 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-04-01 to 2025-04-30.
• March 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-03-01 to 2025-03-31.
• February 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-02-01 to 2025-02-28.
• January 2025 — 164 currencies, 2025-01-01 to 2025-01-31.
• December 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-12-01 to 2024-12-31.
• November 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-11-01 to 2024-11-30.
• October 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-10-01 to 2024-10-31.
• September 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-09-01 to 2024-09-30.
• August 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-08-01 to 2024-08-31.
• July 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-07-01 to 2024-07-31.
• June 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-06-01 to 2024-06-30.
• May 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-05-01 to 2024-05-31.
• April 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-04-01 to 2024-04-30.
• March 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-03-01 to 2024-03-31.
• February 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-02-01 to 2024-02-29.
• January 2024 — 164 currencies, 2024-01-01 to 2024-01-31.

Keeping the rate attached after the conversion

A lookup solves a moment; the recurring cost sits in the workflow around it. The evidence a reviewer eventually asks for — original amount, currency, rate, source, who approved it, when it was paid — is cheap to capture as the claim moves and expensive to rebuild at month end from exports and memory.

That is the part Clara Global is built for. Each expense claim keeps its original amount and currency, and the exchange rate applied is locked at submission: the amount an approver validates is the amount that reaches the reimbursement report, with no silent re-conversion in between. The approval rules your finance team defines — by amount, by category, by entity — are evaluated on the claim itself, and each decision is recorded with the approver’s identity and timestamp.

The workflow ends in a payment-ready reimbursement report grouped by currency and bank account, which your finance team executes through its own bank. Clara Global does not execute transfers — banking controls stay exactly where they already are — and the same flow works for employees in any country and any currency. The point for this page’s reader is narrow and practical: the rate evidence you assemble by hand in a spreadsheet today is a by-product of the workflow when the workflow captures it at submission.