Methodology

The open market rate is the retail price of physical currency in Pakistan — what a licensed exchange company charges over the counter, as opposed to the wholesale rate banks trade with each other. We publish one national rate per currency, written the way every exchange company in Pakistan writes its board — from the company's side. The buying figure is the rate a company buys the currency at, so it is what you receive when you sell; the selling figure is the higher rate it sells at, so it is what you pay when you buy. Why the counter down the road quotes something else goes through what moves a single outlet's price.

It is one figure, maintained by us, and it is not a quote from any particular counter. We do not operate a portal that exchange companies push prices into, and we do not present the rate as a survey of the market. It is our reading of where the open market is trading, published so a reader has a number to check a counter's offer against — dealers differ from it in both directions, and the FAQ says so.

A rate is not removed for age. Every currency carries the time it was last revised, and that timestamp — not the presence of the figure — is what tells you how current it is. The last price the open market traded at remains the answer to what the rate is; a blank space is not, and a reader who finds nothing where a number should be learns less than one who finds a number dated three days ago. A currency is absent from the board only when it has never been quoted. Rates more than 20% away from the reference rate are rejected on entry, so a mistyped figure cannot reach the board.

The reference rate shown alongside the open market board is the global mid-market rate, refreshed hourly from a third-party FX feed. It tracks Pakistan’s interbank rate closely but it is not the State Bank of Pakistan’s own publication, and this site does not describe it as such. SBP’s published USD/PKR figures — the M2M revaluation rate and the weighted-average interbank bid and offer — are shown separately and attributed to SBP by name, with a link back to the page they were read from.

The State Bank of Pakistan publishes the register of licensed exchange companies and their authorised branch addresses. Every company in our directory is matched against that register before it is listed, and a branch is only published once its address appears there as an authorised location. A counter trading from an address that is not on the register is not an authorised branch, whatever its signage says, and it does not appear here.

Companies whose licence status changes are updated on review rather than continuously, so the register itself remains the authority. Where our listing and the register disagree, the register is correct — please tell us and we will fix it.

Corridor tables are ordered by one number: what the recipient actually receives, after the transfer fee and the provider’s margin on the mid-market rate. Fee and rate are both displayed because both drive that figure, but neither ranks on its own — a zero-fee transfer with a wide rate margin routinely delivers fewer rupees than a small fee at near mid-market.

Where a live provider feed covers the corridor, each row carries the fee and margin that provider is currently advertising, re-collected roughly hourly, and is labelled live price. Where no feed covers it — the Gulf corridors, which carry the largest share of remittances to Pakistan — the row is labelled estimate and uses a reviewed fee schedule instead. Each provider is pinned to one named product, because they price differently by funding method, service tier, amount threshold and delivery channel; the page states which product each row assumes.

We earn a commission from some providers when you follow a link and complete a transfer. Commission plays no part in the ranking. There is no featured placement, no paid position and no way for a provider to buy its way up a table — the order is computed from the received amount and nothing else, and the admin tools deliberately expose no field that could override it. Every outbound provider link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" and is excluded from search engine crawling.

If a rate, a listing or a contact detail on this site is wrong, we want to know. Send us a correction and we will check it against the source and update the page.

Written by Usama Haseeb Ahmed — Founder, FindMyExchange