Customs exchange rates
Customs does not work with today's rate. One fixed rate per currency applies for a full calendar month, published before that month starts, and it sets the customs value of every declaration accepted in that month. The rates are below, followed by what you need to know to apply them correctly.
Valid from 2026-10-01 · Published on 2026-09-23
| Currency | Rate | per euro |
|---|---|---|
| USD | 1.1411 | 1 EUR |
| GBP | 0.8595 | 1 EUR |
| CNY | 7.6538 | 1 EUR |
| JPY | 180.2 | 1 EUR |
| CHF | 0.939 | 1 EUR |
| PLN | 4.3765 | 1 EUR |
| CZK | 24.383 | 1 EUR |
| SEK | 11.272 | 1 EUR |
| NOK | 10.799 | 1 EUR |
| DKK | 7.4756 | 1 EUR |
| TRY | 55.7283 | 1 EUR |
| HUF | 364.29 | 1 EUR |
| RON | 5.2785 | 1 EUR |
| CAD | 1.6077 | 1 EUR |
| AUD | 1.6146 | 1 EUR |
| INR | 109.25 | 1 EUR |
| BRL | 5.8564 | 1 EUR |
| ZAR | 18.6537 | 1 EUR |
| HKD | 8.9506 | 1 EUR |
| SGD | 1.4587 | 1 EUR |
The customs rate is fixed for a month. The rate of the penultimate Wednesday applies to every declaration accepted in the following month.
What exactly is a customs exchange rate?
A customs exchange rate is the rate you use to convert an invoice amount in a foreign currency into euro for the declaration. It is not a bank rate, not a daily rate, and not the rate your finance team books the payment at. It is a rate the customs authority sets, and it is the only rate that is valid on the declaration. That distinction is the source of almost every argument on this subject. Purchasing looks at the rate the supplier was actually paid at, treasury looks at the forward rate that was hedged, and the declaration looks at neither. For the customs value, only the official rate of the month in which the declaration is accepted counts. In practice that means the euro amount on the declaration is almost never the amount you eventually transfer to the supplier. That is not an error. They answer two different questions: what did the shipment cost, and what is the value you pay duty on.
Why is the rate fixed for a whole month, and where does it come from?
Because a declaration would otherwise be impossible to audit. If every declaration carried the rate of the day it was filed, the same invoice would produce a different customs value after a single day of delay, and every audit would begin by reconstructing a rate for a specific date years ago. A monthly rate removes that variable. The rate comes from the reference rates of the European Central Bank. The ECB publishes a daily reference rate per currency against the euro. The rate quoted on the second to last Wednesday of a month becomes the customs rate for the whole of the following month, in the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland and the rest of the euro area at the same time. So the rate is known before the month begins: you can calculate the customs value of a shipment arriving next month today. There is one exception. If a currency moves sharply within the month against the rate in use, a new rate can take effect from the next Wednesday instead of waiting for the first of the following month. With the major currencies that is rare, with weaker currencies it is worth watching. The national customs authorities publish the rates in their own tariff application, so you do not have to pull them out of the ECB series yourself. Outside the euro area, separate rules apply. HMRC publishes its own monthly rate for declarations in CDS, and it differs from the EU rate. Anyone filing on both sides of the Channel works with two sets of rates side by side.
Which rate belongs to which declaration?
The rate of the month in which the declaration is accepted. Not the month on the invoice, not the month of shipment, not the month you pay the supplier. Acceptance is the only moment that counts, and it is also the moment the customs debt arises. That feels counterintuitive, because the invoice is the document in front of you and it carries a date. An invoice dated 27 March that is accepted in DMS on 2 April converts at the April rate. If the same declaration is accepted on 31 March, the March rate applies. Same document, two different customs values, both correct. In practice it goes wrong on files that sit still. Someone converts the value on the day the file comes in, the file then waits for a health certificate or a freight invoice, and the declaration goes out two weeks later at a rate that has since been replaced. The converted amount is already in the file by then and nobody looks at it again.
What goes wrong with the wrong rate?
The declaration is simply accepted. That is the hard part. A wrong rate produces no error message from DMS, because the customs value is a valid number in a valid field. There is just a different amount there than there should be, and nothing in the chain points it out to you. The deviation per line is small. Consecutive monthly rates are often one to two percent apart, so the customs value is one to two percent too high or too low, and the duty and the import VAT move with it. On a single line nobody notices. On a flow of hundreds of shipments a month, year after year, it is a structural difference that surfaces in one go during an audit. Too low means an assessment with interest over the whole period the authority looks back. Too high means you overpaid, have to discover it yourself and claim it back yourself, which in practice almost never happens. Both directions cost money, and both are avoidable with the right rate at the right moment.
What do you do when the invoice and the declaration fall in different months?
At a month boundary the question is not which rate the invoice carries, but when the declaration actually goes out. If filing lands in the last days of the month, run both rates and see whether it matters. On a shipment worth a few thousand euro the difference is small enough to ignore, on a full container at high value it is not. The safe habit is to convert as late as possible. Calculate the customs value at the moment you draft the declaration, not at intake, and use the rate that applies then. A file that sits for a week should be converted again before it goes out. That is exactly the step that gets skipped by hand. Watch the supplementary declaration too. Under entry in the declarant's records the customs debt arises at the moment of entry, not at the supplementary declaration that follows later in the month or in the month after. The rate belongs to the first moment. Anyone taking the supplementary declaration as the starting point uses the wrong rate at every change of month.
How does the converted value end up on the declaration?
Convert per item line, not on the invoice total. Every line carries its own customs value and its own commodity code with its own duty rate. If you convert the total and then spread it across the lines, value shifts between duty rates and the calculation stops being correct, even though the grand total looks right. Round the way the declaration system requires, as a rule to two decimals per line, and do not absorb the rounding difference on the last line. A difference of a few cents is normal and nobody objects to it. Shifting value between lines to arrive at a round total is a problem, because the declared value per commodity code then differs from the invoice it is compared against during an audit. Do not forget the additions. Freight and insurance up to the place of entry into the EU are often in a different currency from the goods themselves. Each amount is converted at the monthly rate of its own currency before it is added to the customs value. Two currencies in one file is not an exception in sea freight, it is the normal case.
What changes when the system applies the rate itself?
A whole category of correction work disappears. SKAI reads the invoice amount and the currency out of the document itself, with a source label back to the line it came from, and applies the rate that is valid at the moment the declaration is drafted. If a file sits until the following month, it converts again instead of carrying an outdated amount forward. Because the conversion happens per line, and the amounts on the invoice, the packing list and the freight invoice are compared against each other, a difference surfaces before the declaration goes out rather than during an audit afterwards. Your declarant sees a flag in the file instead of a silent two percent deviation on every line. That is the difference between a rate someone has to look up and a rate that is simply there. It does not save hours per file. It removes an error you would never see without an audit, and over a year that is the more expensive of the two.