Stats › Currencies and commodities › The euro
The euro since 1999
The euro is the only major currency with a birth certificate. It has a first day, a fixed opening value, and a published daily rate for every business day since. No other currency you trade lets you go back and read the whole file.
So this page is that file, or at least the parts of it that matter. The rate the euro was born at, the two times it has traded below the dollar, the exact days it crossed, the record low in October 2000, the record high in July 2008, and the list of countries that have joined since, most recently Bulgaria on 1 January 2026.
Everything here comes from the ECB's own daily reference rate series, a Federal Reserve Bulletin article written in 1999, the ECB's 1998 press release fixing the conversion rates, the Council of the EU and the Bundesbank. Where I had to use a commercial republisher of the ECB series to get old daily numbers, I say so and I say which one.
The euro was fixed against the ECU at 1.16675 dollars on 31 Dec 1998 and its first ECB reference rate, on 4 Jan 1999, was 1.1789. It bottomed at 0.8252 on 26 Oct 2000 and peaked at 1.5990 on 15 Jul 2008, a range of 93.8% on the same daily series. It has been below the dollar in exactly two episodes: 27 Jan 2000 to 5 Dec 2002, and 23 Aug 2022 to 10 Nov 2022, with a low of 0.9565 on 28 Sep 2022. The ECB reference rate was 1.1485 on 31 Jul 2026. 21 EU countries now use the euro, up from 11 at launch, plus four microstates by agreement and two more without one.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 2 tables and 9 named sources, roughly 2600 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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