Search "USD to EUR" on Google and you'll get a clean number — that's the mid-market rate, also called the interbank rate. It's the midpoint between the price buyers are willing to pay and sellers are willing to accept for a currency, traded between major financial institutions. It's the closest thing to a "true" exchange rate that exists.
Almost nobody gets that rate directly. Banks, card networks, currency exchange counters, and money transfer services all build a markup — also called a spread — on top of the mid-market rate, and keep the difference. It's usually invisible, because it's baked into the exchange rate itself rather than shown as a separate line-item fee.
If you know the mid-market rate and the rate you were actually quoted, the markup is simple to work out:
For example, if the mid-market rate is 1.10 and your bank quotes 1.067, you're paying about a 3% markup. On a $1,000 exchange, that's roughly $30 that goes to the provider rather than into your pocket — without a single explicit "fee" ever appearing on your statement.
| Provider | Typical markup |
|---|---|
| Traditional bank (in-branch or transfer) | 1–4% |
| Credit/debit card foreign transaction | 1–3% fee, often plus a smaller rate markup |
| Airport & tourist currency exchange counters | Often the highest of any common option |
| Specialist transfer services (Wise and similar) | ~0.3–0.5% |
| Weekend / after-market-hours conversions | Often an added premium on top of the above |
The pattern is consistent: the more convenient and immediate the option, the worse the rate tends to be. A currency counter at an airport will convert your cash instantly with no paperwork — and that convenience is exactly what you're paying the largest markup for.
Global currency markets are effectively closed from Friday evening to Sunday evening (Eastern Time), since the major trading centers — London, New York, Tokyo — are shut. Any provider converting currency during that window is pricing without a live market to reference, and most compensate by widening their markup. The same applies during unusually volatile periods for a given currency. If timing is flexible, converting on a weekday during active trading hours generally gets a tighter spread.
When you pay by card abroad, two separate things can happen. The card network (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) converts the purchase using its own daily rate, which is usually very close to the mid-market rate. Separately, your card-issuing bank often adds its own foreign transaction fee — commonly 1–3% — on top of that. It's worth checking whether a specific card advertises "no foreign transaction fees," since that fee is the part most within your control to avoid.
The Currency category on this site pulls live rates from Frankfurter, which sources official ECB reference rates — daily benchmark rates published by the European Central Bank, calculated the same way the mid-market rate is: without any retail markup. That makes it a solid, markup-free benchmark for figuring out how good or bad a quoted rate is. What it won't tell you is the exact rate a specific bank, card, or currency counter will actually give you at the counter — for that, you'd need to check their quoted rate against the benchmark using the formula above.