How this site measures the dollar-to-naira rates

This page explains where the two rates on this site come from, how they are checked, and what limits a reader should keep in mind. No forecast is made; the site records what it has seen.

Why there are two numbers and which one a transaction settles at

Nigeria runs two dollar markets side by side. The official market is the Nigerian Foreign Exchange Market, where banks and authorised dealers trade under Central Bank rules and the rate is published each trading day. The street market is made of cash dealers in places like Lagos, quoting their own sell and buy prices. A bank transfer, a card payment or a formal business transaction should settle at the official rate or close to it. A cash exchange at a bureau or with a street dealer settles at the street rate. The gap between the two is the extra naira a person pays when they cannot get dollars at the official price.

This site prints both numbers because a reader searching for the dollar rate will meet both, and the difference between them is often the most useful fact. The official figure is the CBN's volume-weighted NFEM rate for the latest trading day; the street figure is an average of dealer quotes posted by users on a rate site. Neither is a price that every buyer or seller will receive. The official rate is an average across large transactions; the street rate is an average across a small number of posted quotes. The gap shown is the street sell rate minus the official rate, expressed in naira and as a per cent of the official rate.

How the CBN rate is built and when it is provisional

The Central Bank of Nigeria publishes a rate for the NFEM each trading day. It is a volume-weighted average of deals reported in that window, meaning larger transactions count more heavily than small ones. The CBN also publishes a high, a low and a close for the day. The rate on this site is read from the JSON feed behind the CBN's exchange-rates page, and it is the latest available trading day.

The newest CBN row can be provisional. On some days the rate rests on interbank deals only, with no deals yet counted in the wider NFEM; this site marks such a rate as provisional. A provisional rate may be revised later in the day or the next morning when more deals are included. A reader using the official rate should check whether it is marked provisional before treating it as final. The CBN publishes no row for weekends and public holidays, so on those days the official figure shown is the last trading day's rate.

Where the street rate comes from and why it is thin

The street rate on this site is the Lagos sell and buy average that NgnRates.com computes from rates users post in its comments. On many days that is a single quote per side, so it is a reported rate, not a survey of bureaux. A single dealer's quote can be influenced by location, the size of the transaction, the payment method and the dealer's own stock. The same user-posted rate may be a genuine offer, an asking price that no one accepted, or a guess.

Because it is an average of posted quotes, the street rate here is thinner evidence than a bank print. It does not include every dealer in Lagos, and it does not weight quotes by volume. It is published every day including weekends, when the CBN publishes nothing. A reader should treat the street figure as a rough indication of the cash market, not as the price they will be offered at a particular counter. For any real transaction, the dealer's own quote is the only figure that matters.

What this site refuses to print: forecasts, a 'real' rate, invented dealer quotes

This site does not forecast the naira. It records the rates it has seen and shows them as they were published. No prediction is made about which way the official or street rate will move, and no target is set. A forecast would be a guess, and a guess printed beside live numbers would mislead.

The site also refuses to print a single 'real' dollar-to-naira rate. There is no such thing: the official rate and the street rate are both real, for different transactions. Merging them into one number would hide the gap that this site exists to show. Finally, the site never invents dealer quotes to fill a gap in the street series. If no user has posted a quote for a side, that side is left blank rather than estimated. A blank is more honest than a made-up number.