Historic Exchange Rates

For historic exchange rates, you may turn to one of the online rate providers, or for longer data series, to central banks.

Generally speaking, the free online data providers have 5-10 years of historic data, while the central banks (should) have much, much longer data series. These data series as used in academic research, analyst forecasts, and in many other places.

Historic Exchange Rates – Free Online Providers

In addition, the service has many options as to the output format, making it easier to work with these series in spreadsheets and other mathematical software.

The formats that OANDA is able to provide the data are:

• ASCII,
• CSV, and
• HTML formats.

Especially the ASCII and CSV formats are easy to import into most spreadsheet applications.

Also, you can choose from different exchange rate formats, from interbank rate to typical cash rate.

Historic Exchange Rates – Central Banks

Central banks normally have archives with exchange rates since the inception of the country’s currency. However, having these long data series, not all central banks have them available online.

Some of the central banks that offer historic rates include:

• federalreserve.gov/releases/H10/hist/ (U.S. Federal Reserve)
• www.norges-bank.no/english/statistics/exchange/ (Central Bank of Norway)
• www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-xml.html (European Central Bank)