Central Bank Exchange Rates by Country: Which API Actually Serves Them?

Search for "exchange rate API" and the first page is the same handful of names: ExchangeRate-API.com, Open Exchange Rates, Fixer, currencyapi, and the free Frankfurter. They are good products. But if the question you are actually asking is "what was the Reserve Bank of India's rate on 30 June?" or "give me the Bank of England spot rate for this invoice", most of them cannot answer it — not because their data is wrong, but because they never claim to serve a named central bank's table in the first place.

This guide is the table we wished existed when we started building official-rate coverage: one row per country, the central bank that publishes that country's official rate, and which API serves that bank's own numbers. Everything below was checked against each provider's live documentation and API on 7 September 2026.

Two different products that share one name

A mid-market rate is the midpoint between the best bid and offer on the interbank market. It moves every second, and the commercial APIs above compute it by blending several feeds. ExchangeRate-API describes its output as an "indicative midpoint" collected "from multiple central banks & commercial sources"; Open Exchange Rates says its rates are "blended algorithmically from multiple reliable sources". That is the right design for a checkout page or a dashboard.

A central bank rate is something else: a figure the bank itself publishes, usually once per business day, that never changes after publication. The ECB reference rate at 16:00 CET, the Fed's H.10 release, the Bank of Japan's fixing, the RBI reference rate. Accounting standards, customs valuation, VAT returns and transfer-pricing files cite that number, by publisher and date. A blend that used it as one input is not the same thing, and an auditor will say so.

Only two of the APIs in this comparison pass that test: Frankfurter, whose free v2 aggregates 84 official providers, and AllRatesToday, which serves 113 central banks plus three tax authorities. The rest serve one blended mid-market rate per pair and are listed here so the distinction is explicit.

The table: 50 countries, their central bank, and who serves it

"Since" is the first date available through each API, not the bank's own archive. "Blended mid-market only" means ExchangeRate-API, Open Exchange Rates, Fixer and currencyapi serve one aggregated rate per pair and do not expose the bank's table. Frankfurter's US provider is FRED (St. Louis Fed) and its India provider is FBIL, not the RBI.

Frankfurter coverage is read from its public /v2/providers endpoint; ExchangeRate-API, Open Exchange Rates, Fixer and currencyapi descriptions are from their public documentation. All can change — check the provider before citing. The full AllRatesToday catalogue of 113 banks and 3 tax authorities is on the coverage page.

Reading the table

Where the two official-rate APIs overlap

For the big fixings — the ECB, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Bank of Canada, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Nordic and Central European banks, Brazil, Mexico, Türkiye, Russia, South Africa — both Frankfurter and AllRatesToday serve the bank's own table, and for a prototype the free one is a perfectly good choice. The difference in those rows is depth and packaging: Frankfurter's history for some sources reaches further back (its Macau series starts in 1986), while AllRatesToday adds buy/sell rate types where the bank prints a spread, CSV/XML/XLSX output, publication calendars and SDKs.

Where only one of them has the bank

Eleven of the fifty rows are not in Frankfurter's provider list at the time of writing: the Swiss National Bank, People's Bank of China, Bank of Korea, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the central banks of Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh Bank, the State Bank of Vietnam and the Central Reserve Bank of Peru. Frankfurter, in turn, carries a handful of sources AllRatesToday does not: the Deutsche Bundesbank and Banco de Portugal (both euro members whose national lists extend the ECB's), the Croatian National Bank's pre-euro archive, and the Pacific banks of Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu. If your filings cite one of those, that decides it.

Where the United States and India need a footnote

Frankfurter's United States provider is FRED, the St. Louis Fed's data service, which republishes the Fed's H.10 series; AllRatesToday reads the H.10 release directly. For India, Frankfurter uses FBIL, the Financial Benchmarks India reference rate that replaced the RBI's own fixing in 2018, while AllRatesToday serves the RBI reference table back to 2003. Both are legitimate official sources — but they are different publishers, and a tax filing that names one should not be fed the other.

What the commercial APIs are for

None of this makes ExchangeRate-API, Open Exchange Rates, Fixer or currencyapi worse products. They answer "what is EUR/USD right now?" faster and with more currencies than any central bank ever will, and ExchangeRate-API's blending across at least three sources per currency is exactly what you want when a single feed goes stale. The mistake is only in using a blended midpoint where a rule names a publisher. If you need both — live rates for the storefront and the ECB fixing for the month-end journal — AllRatesToday serves both from one key, which is the case it was built for.

Beyond the 50: tax authorities

Three official publishers in the AllRatesToday catalogue are not central banks at all and appear in no other API we know of: HMRC's monthly customs rates for the UK, the US Treasury's quarterly reporting rates, and the Swiss BAZG customs list. When a VAT return or a customs declaration names one of those tables, the central bank's rate is the wrong number even if it is official.

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