Currency Conversion Cost Calculator

What does your bank really take on a currency conversion?

The headline fee on a money transfer is never the full cost. The bigger one, the rate markup, is hidden in the exchange rate itself. This calculator shows you both, using the daily ECB mid-market rate as the honest reference.

The two costs of a currency conversion

When you send money across currencies, you pay two costs that almost no provider lets you see side by side. One is obvious: the fixed transfer fee. The other is the spread: the gap between the rate the bank shows you and the actual mid-market rate the banks themselves use when trading with each other. The spread is usually the bigger of the two, and it’s the one that survives every “no-fee transfer” promotion.

The math, plainly:

Ideal receive  = amount × mid-market rate     (what you'd get at the perfect rate)
Actual receive = amount × offered rate − fee  (what you actually get)

Total cost  = Ideal − Actual
Cost as %   = Total cost ÷ amount × 100

The mid-market rate in the calculator above pulls the European Central Bank’s daily reference rates via Frankfurter, the same source professional FX desks use. Type in the offered rate from your bank’s quote (or an app like Wise / Revolut) and the spread cost falls out automatically.

Why this matters more than it looks

A 2% spread on a 5,000 USD transfer is $100. Doesn’t feel like much, until you realise that’s the kind of fee structure that runs every single time you convert. Send $1,000 home each month at the same markup and you’ve lost $240/year you never saw on a statement. Over five years that’s $1,200, about the cost of a return flight in business class.

The recurring-transfer projection is built into the calculator above. Flip the “How often” toggle and you’ll see the annualised version of the same percentage cost.

What “good” looks like

• Excellent: under 0.6% total cost. About as good as retail currency conversion gets; you’re close to interbank pricing.
• Good: 0.6% to 1.5%. Competitive money-transfer service territory.
• Mediocre: 1.5% to 3%. The typical retail-bank markup. Better is usually available; this is the territory most people walk away from money in.
• Expensive: 3% to 5%. Switching providers would likely save you most of this.
• Gouging: over 5%. Legacy retail banking on small amounts, or airport / remittance-kiosk territory.

These bands are heuristics, not promises; every provider varies by route, amount, and timing. The point isn’t to name names; it’s to make the invisible cost visible.

What this calculator deliberately doesn’t do

It compares a single quote to mid-market. It doesn’t shop for you, doesn’t name providers, and doesn’t advise on which transfer service to use. There are good comparison sites for that. What it does, and what no other calculator quite does, is give you the FX cost in the same terms as your financial plan: a percentage, an annualised figure, a multi-year drag on your savings rate.

What the full version adds

• FX cost shown as part of your full picture: not a one-off calculation but a running tally across every month.
• FX-vs-organic decomposition of your net worth: separates the part that grew because you saved from the part that moved because of exchange rates.
• Annual currency-cost summary across every cross-currency account you hold.
• Per-account FX cost: see which accounts (or routes) are bleeding the most.

Go deeper: Lesson: Multi-Currency Basics →

More tools: Emergency Fund Runway → · Relocation Runway → · FIRE Number → · Read: your savings rate is half FX →

How we think about the numbers behind every figure: The method →

A calculator answers one question. fjordFIRE keeps the whole picture updated every month.