If have foreign income or capital gains, it is essential that you report them while filing your annual taxes. However, calculating foreign income or capital gains can be challenging since you need the foreign exchange rates at the time of the buy and sell transactions.

Explanation to Rule 26 of the Income Tax Rules, 1962 recommends using Telegraphic Transfer Buying Rates (TTBR) of SBI as reference for these calculations. While SBI publishes FX rates on its website daily (except Sundays and bank holidays), it does not provide access historical data.

Recently, I published a project on Github that saves the daily forex rates published by SBI into CSV files, enabling easy access to historical TTBR and Forex Card rates.

You can browse and search the rates on GitHub:

OR download the CSV files and use with Excel or Google Sheets.

Original PDFs (saved from SBI servers) are available in the pdf_files/ folder. For quick verification of the rates, direct links to the PDFs are published with each day’s data.

Note:
SBI explicitly mentions that only the rates published for ₹10-20 lakh transaction range are to be considered as reference rates.

The reference rates do NOT change based on your transaction value, which could be ₹100 or ₹1 Cr.

Known Limitations

  • Data is only available from Jan 2020 onwards.
  • SBI doesn’t publish the rates file on all working days; for such days you can refer to the RBI Reference Rates, or third-party FX rates vendor such as OANDA .