The Ethiopian birr

The Ethiopian birr is the national currency of Ethiopia, written Br and carrying the ISO 4217 code ETB - the code banks, payment processors and every rate on this site use to identify it. One birr is divided into 100 santim.

It is issued by the National Bank of Ethiopia, the country's central bank, which is also the authority setting the rules commercial banks operate their foreign exchange desks under. Notes circulate in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 and 200 birr, with the 200 note and redesigned lower denominations introduced in 2020; santim coins circulate alongside them.

In July 2024 the National Bank of Ethiopia moved to a market-determined exchange rate, ending the managed regime that had kept commercial bank boards closely aligned with an official figure. Before that, asking “the” dollar rate had a single answer. It no longer does.

Each of the 30 banks tracked here now sets and publishes its own rate, and most reprice on every business day. They do not agree. On the current boards the rate paid for a US dollar runs from 160.23 to 164.88 birr - a gap worth about 4644 birr on a 1,000 dollar exchange, for the identical transaction at a different counter.

Every bank publishes two prices for each currency. The cash rate applies to physical banknotes handed across a counter. The transactional rate applies to everything that moves without notes - wire transfers, remittances credited to an account, card settlement and letters of credit.

Handling physical currency costs a bank more, so its cash rate is usually a little worse than its transactional one. Which matters to you depends entirely on how your money is arriving, and both are shown for every bank on this site.

Every figure on ET-Forex comes from an exchange rate board an Ethiopian commercial bank published itself. Parallel - or black market - rates are not collected, quoted or estimated here.

That is a deliberate limit rather than an oversight. A published bank rate is a number you can walk into a branch and transact at, subject to that branch's own limits and documentation requirements. It is the only kind of rate this site is willing to put a bank's name against.