National Bank of Moldova EUR/MDL Exchange Rate History, 1999–2026: 27 Years of Official Rates

The euro became a currency on 1 January 1999, and on that day the National Bank of Moldova set its official rate at 9.7000 lei. For 23 October 2026 the bank set it at 20.1989 lei. In 27 years the euro has a little more than doubled in leu terms, but nearly all of that happened in two waves, 1999 to 2003 and 2008 to 2015. Since 2016 the official rate has stayed inside a band of about three lei. This article walks through the whole series using the bank's own published numbers: 10,142 daily EUR/MDL rates, all of them in the AllRatesToday central-bank archive.

The shape of 27 years

1999 to 2003: the first leg

The series opens with the leu still absorbing the 1998 Russian crisis. The official rate touched its all-time low of 9.4562 on 6 March 1999, then rose to 13.1236 by 18 November 1999, including a 6.9% move in a single day on 15 May. The year ended at 11.6916. After two quiet years the second step came in 2002, when the rate climbed from 11.5337 to 14.3963, a 25% rise in one year, and on to 16.5256 by the end of 2003.

2004 to 2009: the leu holds, then gives way

For the next five years the leu held its ground or strengthened. The official rate spent most of this period between 15 and 17 lei, and in October 2008 it reached 12.8563, the strongest the leu had been against the euro since mid-2002. That level did not survive the global financial crisis: by the end of 2009 the rate was 17.6252, 37% above its October 2008 low.

February 2015: the peak

The largest move in the series came in early 2015, after about a billion dollars disappeared from three Moldovan banks in late 2014. The official rate, 18.9966 at the end of 2014, rose to 20.8837 by 10 February 2015 and then to 24.0154 on 18 February 2015, the highest in the series. It fell back almost as fast: the rate dropped 5.5% on 24 February alone, and by 31 March it was 19.9075. 2015 closed at 21.4779.

2016 to 2026: a narrow band

Since 2016 the series has been the calmest in its history. Every daily rate from 2016 onward sits between 18.7162 (29 September 2022) and 22.9317 (4 May 2016), and since 2018 the range is tighter still. In 2024 the official rate moved less than 0.7 lei all year, between 18.8460 and 19.5252. In 2026 so far it has stayed between 19.7400 and 20.2877.

Year by year: EUR/MDL in the National Bank of Moldova's official rates

"First" is the first official rate of the year, "Last" is the last, and the low and high are the extremes of the daily series within that year.

Lei per euro. Source: National Bank of Moldova official exchange rates, via the AllRatesToday archive. 2026 runs to 23 October.

Monthly averages: the last 13 months

Many people searching for "EUR MDL history" need a monthly figure rather than a daily one, for an expense claim or a statistical return. These are simple averages of the official daily rates held in the archive for each month.

From the end of August 2026 the archive stores the rates the bank publishes on business days only; earlier months also include the weekend rates. October 2026 runs to the 23rd.

What the table looked like on 23 October 2026

The euro is one line in a table of about 40 currencies. A selection, all in lei per one unit:

The bank quotes some currencies per 10 or 100 units on its own page. The API divides those out so every rate is per one unit.

Pulling any date from the archive

The latest table is free and needs no key:

GET https://allratestoday.com/api/open/central-bank/nbm

A specific past date returns the table the bank published that day. If the bank published nothing that day, the response carries the most recent earlier table and says so, instead of guessing:

GET https://allratestoday.com/api/v1/central-bank/nbm/2015-02-18?source=EUR&target=MDL
Authorization: Bearer art_live_your_key

{
  "bank": "nbm",
  "requested_date": "2015-02-18",
  "rate_date": "2015-02-18",
  "published_on_requested_date": true,
  "source": "EUR",
  "target": "MDL",
  "rate": 24.0154,
  "rate_type": "reference",
  "derived": false,
  ...
}

Leave off the pair parameters and the same call returns all 40 currencies from that day's table.

Or with the npm SDK:

import { getRatesForDate } from 'nbm-exchange-rate';

const day = await getRatesForDate('2015-02-18', { apiKey: process.env.ALLRATES_KEY });
const row = day.rates.find(r => r.base === 'EUR' && r.quote === 'MDL');
console.log(day.rate_date, row.value); // 2015-02-18 24.0154

Historical dates and time series need a paid plan. The spoke page for the bank also has an Excel and CSV download for any date range from 1999, and the same archive is in the open central-bank exchange rates dataset under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence for research and non-commercial use.

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