State Bank of Pakistan interbank dollar rate today

The State Bank of Pakistan publishes three USD/PKR numbers on each business day, and they answer different questions. The M2M revaluation rate is the rate banks must revalue their foreign-currency positions at, and it is the figure most often quoted as “the interbank rate”. The weighted-average bid and offer are the volume-weighted rates at which interbank trades actually cleared — the bid is what banks bought dollars at, the offer what they sold at, and the space between them is the market’s own spread.

None of these is a rate you can transact at. They are wholesale figures for trades between banks, in size. What you are quoted at an exchange company counter is the open market rate, which sits above the interbank rate because it carries the dealer’s cash handling cost and margin. Today the global mid-market rate we track sits 0.29 PKR below SBP’s published figure.

It is not a consumer number and was never meant to be one. Banks use it to revalue the foreign-currency assets and liabilities on their books at the end of each day, which is what “mark to market” means. Importers and exporters settling contracts, auditors valuing a balance sheet, and anyone writing a rupee figure into an agreement all reach for the same published rate because it is dated, official and not open to argument.

That is exactly why it is useful to you even though you cannot trade at it: it is the one USD/PKR figure for the day that nobody has an interest in shading. A counter’s quote held against it tells you what the cash is costing you.

The distance between SBP’s figure and the open market rate is the retail cost of physical currency — cash handling, the risk of holding notes whose value moves, premises and margin. It widens when demand for physical dollars rises, and a sharp widening is usually a better signal about the cash market than either number on its own. It is not a measure of anyone being overcharged.

For why one counter differs from the next on the same day, see how open market rates are set. For what SBP does beyond publishing figures — licensing, the documents you must bring, and what it has no say over — see the State Bank and currency exchange.

Most rate sites quote a single “interbank” number without saying where it came from. Ours previously did the same, and it was wrong: the figure driving the rest of this site is a global mid-market rate from a third-party FX feed, close to Pakistan’s interbank rate but not the State Bank’s own publication. Both are useful; conflating them is not. This page carries SBP’s figures, attributed and dated, so the two can be compared rather than confused.