What a foreign purchase really costs on a Canadian card
The exchange rate is not the price. A foreign transaction fee sits on top of it, most Canadian cards charge one, and a surprising number of issuers do not state it at all.
2 min readEach figure carries its own date
Current figures
- $1.4243
- $1.6030
Bank of Canada, as at October 1, 2026. Removed automatically if the source goes stale.
When you buy something in another currency, two things happen. The amount is converted, and most Canadian cards then add a foreign transaction fee on top of the converted amount. The second step is the one that goes unnoticed, because it never appears as a separate line on a receipt.
The Bank of Canada's daily rates for the two currencies Canadians spend in most are shown above.
The fee is charged on the converted amount
A foreign transaction fee is a percentage of the purchase after conversion, not a flat charge. That means it scales with the size of the purchase and with the exchange rate, which is why it matters more on a trip than on a single subscription.
Two cards quoting the same headline rewards rate can differ meaningfully here. A card with no foreign transaction fee returns the whole conversion to you; a card charging the common rate takes a slice of every purchase you make abroad.
Not every issuer states one
This is the part worth knowing before you travel. When we typed the foreign transaction fee for every card in our catalogue into a number we could compute with, a substantial minority of cards had no stated rate to type. Their disclosure says nothing usable.
We do not guess at those. A card with no stated rate is left out of the currency comparisons entirely rather than being shown as though it were free, because assuming zero would be inventing a term the issuer never published.
Compare the actual cost, not the fee
The fee on its own is not the answer either. What you want is the total: the purchase converted at the official rate, plus whatever the card adds. That is a computation, and it is what our currency pages do for every card we can compute.
Pick the currency you are spending in and the comparison is done for you, ranked by what the purchase actually costs rather than by the percentage in the disclosure.
About the rate on this page
The Bank of Canada publishes these as indicative daily averages of aggregated quotes. They are not the rate your issuer will use to settle a specific transaction, and we say so on every page that shows one. Treat the total as a comparison between cards, which is what it is good for, rather than as a quote for a particular purchase.
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