Where to exchange money in Thailand today

How ThaiRate works, and how to read the numbers

What you are looking at

The list above ranks licensed money changers in the city you chose by the rate they publish for the currency you chose. The number next to each shop is the buying rate: how many baht that counter pays for one unit of your currency when you hand over cash. The shop at the top pays the most. Nothing about the order is editorial, and no shop can pay to move up it.

The site follows every branch of the chains that publish their rates online: the Bangkok chains around Ratchadamri and Pratunam, the T.T. counters that cover Pattaya from Naklua to Jomtien, the Twelve Victory network that reaches the provincial capitals and the border towns, and the independent counters in Phuket, Chiang Mai and Hua Hin. A shop appears only when it is on its operator’s own branch list and publishes a rate; a branch that closes is marked as closed and dropped from the ranking.

Where the numbers come from

A small program reads each operator’s public rate page every few minutes, around the clock, and writes the figures into the tables you see. Nobody types a rate by hand. Each figure is checked against the mid-market rate before it is published: a number that sits impossibly far above the market is held back as a misprint rather than shown as a bargain. If a shop’s website cannot be reached, its last confirmed rates stay visible and are marked stale with the time they were last read.

The mid-market line shown under the result is the midpoint between what banks buy and sell at. No cash counter trades at it; it is there so you can see how much of the market rate each shop keeps. A good counter in Bangkok sits a fraction of a percent below it, an airport booth several percent.

Reading a rate board

Every board has two columns. Buying is what the shop pays you for foreign cash; selling is what it charges when you buy foreign cash with baht. On arrival you read the buying column, before flying home you read the selling column, and the gap between the two is the shop’s margin. The button above the results switches the whole ranking to the selling side.

Most shops also quote by banknote size. A 100-dollar note earns more baht per dollar than a 20, and ¥10,000 notes are quoted separately from ¥1,000. The ranking shows the rate for the largest notes, because that is what most visitors carry; the shop’s own page lists every tier. The difference between large and small notes is often bigger than the difference between the best and the worst shop in town, so the single most useful thing you can do is bring large, clean notes.

Using the page

Choose the city you are in, or will be in, and the currency you carry. Enter an amount and the result tells you how many baht you would get at the best counter, and how that compares with yesterday. Near me sorts the list by distance from where you are, Open now hides counters that are closed at this moment, and the map shows them all at once. A star saves a shop so it stays at the top next time. If you want the number without opening the site, the daily e-mail or push alert sends the best rate for your city and currency each morning.

What usually holds, whichever day it is

Rates are sharpest where many counters compete within a few hundred metres: the Ratchadamri and Pratunam blocks in Bangkok are the strongest in the country, and the big chains’ mall counters are usually within a few satang of them. Airport booths are the weakest; the one exception is the counter on the lower floor at Suvarnabhumi, which quotes city rates. In a town with a single chain, every branch tends to post the same number, so the nearest one is as good as any. Boards move with the market during the day, and a holiday or weekend usually leaves them where Friday left them.

What this site is not

ThaiRate does not change money, take bookings or give financial advice. It shows published rates so that you can decide where to go, and the board at the counter is always the one that counts. The site is free; it may show advertising, and some links to hotels, eSIMs and airport transfers are partner links that pay a small commission. Neither has any effect on the ranking. How the data is gathered, who runs the site and how to report a wrong rate are described on the about page and the contact page; the guide collects the longer answers, city by city.

FAQ