Euro and ECU exchange rates

Before the Euro was launched on 1 January 1999, the European Currency Unit (ECU) existed as a basket currency made up of the sum of fixed amounts of 12 out of the 15 currencies of the EU member states. The value of the ECU was calculated as a weighted average of the value of its component currencies. On 1 January 1999 the ECU was replaced by the Euro on a one-for-one basis.

The European Commission website provides more information about the history of the currency.

The ICAEW Library has compiled this guide to help everyone to find the exchange rates they need.

The Library enquiry team can also help ICAEW members, ACA students and other authorised users with requests for exchange rates from a variety of print and online sources. If you would like to know more about the information we can offer, please call us on +44 (0)20 7920 8620, email library@icaew.com or contact us through webchat.

EU-sanctioned daily Euro foreign exchange reference rates are available from the European Central Bank in their Euro Foreign Exchange Reference Rates table, which lists the Euro rates against the currencies of countries that have not joined the Euro or that are non-EC countries. The ECB also lists the Daily nominal effective exchange rate of the Euro, which is "based on weighted averages of bilateral euro exchange rates against 42 trading partners of the euro area".

The European Central Bank also collates monthly, quarterly and annual figures in the ECB Economic Bulletin. The Bank's website provides free access to latest bulletin, as well as to previous issues going back to Issue 1, 2015. A new Bulletin is published eight times per year, two weeks after each monetary policy meeting. The publication date for the next issue is given on the page linked to above. Each issue gives nominal and real effective exchange rates for the Euro against the EER-19 and EER-42 groups of trading partners (with the EER-19 ‘real’ rates being calculated in five alternative ways), plus bilateral ECU or Euro exchange rates against 12 currencies for countries that are not part of the Euro or that are non-EC countries. From 1999-2014 this publication was known as the Monthly Bulletin, all back issues of which are available to download in PDF format from the Bank's website.

For the period of time following the introduction of the Euro on 1st January 1999 until the introduction of the Euro in its physical form in 2002 the Bank of England maintained "national competitiveness indices" for the currencies that entered the Euro. These were calculated using a combination of the fixed rate from 31st December 1998 and the movement of the Euro against sterling and the dollar. These rates are available through the Spot Exchange Rates section of the Bank of England's Monetary & Financial Statistics Interactive Database, but are not to be regarded as official rates.