SBI Forex Rates: TT Buying Rate, Card Rate Sheet, and How to Read It

SBI forex rates are the buy and sell prices State Bank of India publishes each morning for converting foreign currency to and from rupees. They sit on a daily "forex card rate" sheet, and the number that matters when money arrives from abroad is the TT buying rate: the rate SBI uses to convert an incoming wire into INR.

For an IT-services exporter or SMB receiving foreign payments, the TT buying rate is what decides how many rupees actually reach your account. It is not the rate you see on Google. Banks quote it a few paise below the live interbank rate, and that gap is the FX margin you pay without a line item.

SBI updates these rates daily, so any figure in this article is indicative only. Check the live sheet before you act. If you receive foreign payments regularly, a receiving accounts setup that settles at the mid-market rate can close most of that gap, and we cover that honestly below.

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 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 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 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.

Numbers make the margin concrete. The figures below are indicative and illustrative only, as of July 2026. Always read the live SBI sheet for the day.

Suppose the mid-market USD/INR rate is ₹87.20 and SBI's TT buying rate for the day is ₹86.75. The gap is 45 paise per dollar. Add a flat inward handling charge of about ₹500 plus GST.

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.

Because the sheet changes daily, use a live source rather than any cached figure.

• SBI's card rate sheet: the published PDF carries the date, time stamp and every rate column. It is the definitive number for the day.
• Your SBI relationship manager or branch: useful for larger inflows, where a better rate may be negotiable above a threshold.
• Rule 115 timing for tax: if you are converting foreign income for a return, the relevant date is the last day of the month before the income is due or received, so the historic TT buying rate for that date applies, not today's.

Read the time stamp before you rely on a rate. A sheet from yesterday is stale, and intraday market moves are not reflected until the next update.

The same live-sheet habit applies elsewhere. If Indus Ind Bank forex rates is your bank instead, the same read-the-time-stamp discipline applies before you rely on a quoted figure.

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.

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.

SBI forex rates are a daily sheet of buy and sell prices, and for money arriving from abroad only the TT buying rate applies. It is set below the mid-market rate by an exchange margin, then flat charges are added, so your rupee credit is lower than the number you saw quoted. Read the live sheet, match the TT BUY column to your inward payment, and account for both the margin and the fees. If you receive foreign payments often, settling at the mid-market rate with visible fees is the durable way to keep more of what you earn.

The same reasoning applies if you bank with Union Bank forex rates, Bank of Baroda forex rates, or any other Indian lender: the sheet name changes, the arithmetic does not.