SBI Forex & Exchange Rate Today: TT Buying, TT Selling, Card Rate & Charges

SBI's TT buying rate for USD today is ₹95.20.

SBI (State Bank of India) publishes these itself.

Every rate below comes from the sheet SBI published on 20 August 2026 at 9:09 AM, refreshed here twice a day.

State Bank of India publishes a new rate sheet every working day and revises it as the market moves. Money arriving from abroad is converted at its TT (telegraphic transfer) buying rate, which sits below the mid-market rate. That gap is the markup, and it is separate from GST on the conversion.

SBI's USD TT buying rate today is ₹95.20. If money is coming in to you, that is the rate that applies.

This sheet covers INR 10 lakh to INR 20 lakh. For transfers above that, SBI's sheet directs you to a forex handling branch.

Source: SBI Forex Card Rates (PDF), published by SBI itself. Rates are indicative and subject to change with market movements. The rate that applies is the one prevailing when your account is credited.

Which rate applies depends on what you are doing, not on which one you saw first.

SBI's TT buying rate for USD is ₹95.20, also written as TTBR, short for TT buying rate.

One limit: this rate applies to transfers of ₹10,00,000 and above. SBI publishes no rate below that.

• Mid-market reference: ₹95.75
• SBI TT buying: ₹95.20
• Gap: 0.57%, about ₹8,250 on a USD 15,000 invoice

TT stands for telegraphic transfer, the electronic route most cross-border payments travel. The TT buying rate is the rate at which SBI buys foreign currency from you when a payment lands, giving you rupees in return. It applies to clean inward remittances: export proceeds, freelance income, salary credits and business receipts that arrive by wire with no physical instrument to collect.

The mirror image is the TT selling rate, used when SBI sells you foreign currency for an outward payment. The selling rate always sits above the buying rate. The space between them is the bank's spread, and it is where a slice of your money goes on every conversion. This direction split is the heart of inward remittance vs outward remittance.

For inward remittances into India, the TT buying rate is the only rate on the sheet that concerns you. If a client in the US or UK pays you, SBI applies the TT buying rate for that currency to work out your rupee credit.

One reason the term matters beyond banking: under Rule 115 of the Income-tax Rules, 1962, foreign income is converted to rupees for tax using the SBI TT buying rate on the relevant date. So the same rate that sets your payout also sets your taxable value, which is why exporters keep an eye on it.

The same TT buy/TT sell split shows up everywhere. South Indian Bank forex rates use the identical structure, just with a different starting margin.

SBI's published rate does not cover every transfer size. The sheet is headed "card rates for transactions between Rs. 10 lakhs and Rs. 20 lakhs", and it tells you to contact a branch outside that range.

That matters because of where most export invoices land. At today's rate, ₹10,00,000 is roughly USD 10,504. An invoice smaller than that, which covers most freelance and small-business work, falls below the floor of the published sheet.

So on a smaller invoice the honest answer is that the rate cannot be looked up. You find out what you were given after the money lands, from your credit advice.

SBI's TT selling rate for USD is ₹96.05. This is what you pay when the bank sells you foreign currency, so it applies to money going out, not to export earnings coming in.

The gap between the two TT rates is ₹0.85 per dollar, or 0.9% of the buying rate. That spread is what the bank keeps.

SBI publishes these on the daily sheet it calls its "Forex Card Rates". The card and currency-note columns each carry a different rate from the TT rate.

Card and cash rates carry wider margins than TT rates. Do not use a card rate to estimate what an inward wire will fetch.

On USD the card cash-out rate is ₹0.07 below the TT buying rate, and the currency-note rate is ₹1.20 below it.

SBI publishes one sheet, usually mid-morning, with a time stamp and the date. Each currency runs across four or five rate columns. Reading them in order tells you which rate applies to which situation.

• TT BUY: the rate for money coming in by wire, with no instrument to collect. This is your inward-remittance rate.
• TT SELL: the rate for money going out by wire. Higher than TT BUY.
• BILL BUY: used when SBI buys a foreign-currency instrument such as an export bill or cheque, which carries collection risk, so it is a shade below TT BUY.
• BILL SELL: the counterpart for import bills and documentary payments going out.
• FOREX TRAVEL / currency notes: the rate for loading a travel card or buying physical cash, which carries the widest margin of all.

You can see the current columns and time stamp on SBI's own forex card rates sheet, which is the primary source and updates every business day. For a plain-English tour of how any bank builds these columns, our guide to bank foreign exchange rates walks through the same logic across lenders.

The key habit: match the rate column to your transaction. A services exporter receiving a clean USD wire reads the USD TT BUY line, nothing else. Reading the wrong column is the most common way people misjudge what they will receive.

Private banks are no exception either. SBM Bank forex rates run the same five-column layout, so once you can read SBI's sheet, a smaller bank's sheet reads the same way.

The conversion margin is only one cost. On top of it, banks levy explicit charges when a foreign payment arrives.

• Inward remittance handling / commission: a per-transaction charge for processing the credit, typically a flat amount plus applicable GST.
• SWIFT or correspondent-bank fees: deducted along the wire's path before it even reaches India, so the amount SBI receives can already be short.
• GST on the commission: goods and services tax applies to the bank's fee, not to the remittance value itself.

None of these touch the FX margin, so your true cost is the margin plus the flat charges combined. A full breakdown of what banks deduct sits in our guide to bank charges for foreign remittance. If your inflow is later remitted out or you are weighing tax at source on outward flows, TCS on foreign remittance explains where that applies.

For an exporter, the paperwork side matters as much as the cost, and none of it changes based on which rate you receive.

If your payer's own bank is a large international name, for example the bank of america forex rates sheet, that leg of the transfer can add its own margin before the funds even reach SBI.

Domestic charges follow a similar shape elsewhere too. IDBI Bank forex rates carries its own handling fee and GST layer on top of the rate spread, the same combination covered above.

The rate is only part of the bill. If money comes in from abroad every month, four other things cost you money or time. None of them are on SBI's rate sheet.

To be fair: this does not beat your bank at everything. If your current account, overdraft and trade limits are all with State Bank of India, keeping everything in one place may matter more than any row above. This adds up when money comes in from abroad a few times a month, every month.

Say a client sends you USD 15,000 for a completed project. On the sheet SBI published on 20 August 2026 at 9:09 AM, its TT buying rate was ₹95.20. The mid-market reference that day was ₹95.75.

• At the mid-market rate: 15,000 × 95.75 = ₹14,36,250
• At SBI's TT buying rate: 15,000 × 95.20 = ₹14,28,000
• Difference from the rate margin alone: ₹8,250, before GST and any certificate fee.

That ₹8,250 is the spread, not a fee you agreed to, and it recurs on every transfer settled at card rates.

One note on the reference: it is a daily rate, so the exact gap on your own transfer is the one on your credit advice.

A platform fee works differently. On the same invoice, Xflow's Growth plan charges 0.4% of the transfer value, about $60, with no markup on the mid-market rate, so the cost sits in a visible fee instead of inside the rate. Both that fee and the bank figures above are before GST, which applies either way.

On this single $5,000 credit, roughly ₹2,840 does not reach you. Scale that across a month of client payments and the FX margin, not the visible fee, becomes the larger line. This is why exporters who receive regularly treat the rate, not the headline fee, as the real cost.

SBI publishes its own "Forex Card Rates", and that document is the authority on the rate you will be given, not any figure quoted elsewhere. It is a PDF you can download and keep.

Open it here: SBI Forex Card Rates. The bank replaces it each working day, so the link always resolves to the current sheet, and the copy the figures above come from was published on 20 August 2026 at 9:09 AM.

Check the date printed inside the file before you use it. A saved copy keeps its old numbers, and a bank sheet from last week is a different rate, not a rounding difference.

If you are converting foreign income for a tax return, the date that matters is not today. Under Rule 115 of the Income-tax Rules, 1962, foreign income is converted at the SBI TT buying rate for the last day of the month before the income was due or received. So the historic rate for that date applies, not the rate above.

The rate you find on Google or a currency app is the mid-market rate (MMR), the midpoint of live global buy and sell quotes. It is a reference number, not a rate any bank pays a retail customer.

Underneath that sits the interbank rate (IBR), the wholesale rate at which banks trade currency among themselves. SBI works out its TT buying rate by taking an interbank reference and subtracting an exchange margin. So your TT buying rate is deliberately set below the live market by design.

The mechanism in one line: TT buying rate = interbank buying rate minus SBI's exchange margin. That margin is small in percentage terms but real in rupees, and it is why your credit is lower than the number you expected.

Two more things widen the gap. First, the rate is set once or twice a day, so if the market moves in your favour after the sheet is published, you do not capture it. Second, the margin is not shown as a fee, so it reads as if conversion was free. It was not. This hidden markup is separate from the flat charges we cover next, and it is layered on top of the wholesale interbank rates that banks trade at.

Federal Bank forex rates are calculated the same way: an interbank reference rate minus the bank's own exchange margin, not a rate set from thin air.

The honest summary: on a bank inward remittance you receive fewer rupees than the live mid-market rate, because the TT buying rate is quoted below the interbank rate and the flat charges come on top. That is standard practice, not an SBI quirk.

Xflow takes a different route for inward flows. It settles at the live mid-market rate (MMR) with fees shown as a visible line, so there is no hidden margin buried in the conversion. Settlement is next business day (T+1), and for exporters moving regular volumes this keeps far more of each payment than a traditional bank wire. Xflow holds final RBI Payment Aggregator - Cross Border (PA-CB) authorisation for both exports and imports (as of February 2026), and is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certified.

For teams that want to convert at a chosen level rather than whatever the sheet reads that morning, the FX AI Analyst offers limit orders, a target-rate tool that executes when your rate is hit. It is a timing tool, not investment advice.

If you are new to how inward flows work, start with foreign inward remittance to see how a foreign payment reaches your Indian account and what happens at each step.

This is the question that stops most services exporters from acting, so it is worth answering plainly. Switching the rate you receive at does not change the compliance trail your accountant relies on.

A foreign payment still needs its purpose code, its bank documentation and its realisation record whether it lands via SBI or another route. The Foreign Inward Remittance Certificate, or FIRC, is still issued against the credit, and downstream systems such as EDPMS (the RBI's Export Data Processing and Monitoring System) and your GST refund workflow read from the same underlying documents.

For an IT-services exporter, that means the choice is narrower than it feels. You are not trading compliance safety for a better rate. You are deciding whether the conversion happens at a marked-down TT buying rate or at the live mid-market rate. A foreign inward remittance generates the same records either way, so the paperwork behaves identically.

Two practical habits help. First, keep the credit advice for every inward payment, because it shows the rate applied and supports both reconciliation and Rule 115 tax conversion. Second, reconcile the rupees credited against the rate on the sheet for that date, so a wider-than-usual gap is caught early rather than at year end. Exporters who track the received rate month over month tend to notice the cumulative FX margin long before a one-off transaction ever flags it.

The mechanics are identical across lenders. Each publishes a TT buying rate set below the interbank rate, and the margin varies bank to bank rather than day to day in any dramatic way. What differs is the size of the spread and the flat charges bolted on.

If you are comparing where your inward payments land best, our rate explainers for canara bank forex rates, hdfc bank forex rates, icici bank forex rates and tamilnad mercantile bank forex rates apply the same reading method to each. The pattern holds: read the TT BUY column, note the gap to the mid-market rate, and add the flat charges.

The takeaway for a services exporter is not that one bank is always better. It is that every bank's TT buying rate is a marked-down rate, and comparing the size of the mark-down across your options is the real exercise.

SBI publishes its rate sheet every working day and revises it intraday. On 20 August 2026 its USD TT buying rate was ₹95.20, about 0.57% below a daily mid-market reference rate of ₹95.75.

If you receive export income, the TT buying rate is the one that applies to you. Check it on the sheet, then check your Foreign Inward Remittance Advice (FIRA) to see what rate actually applied.