The exchange rate on your royalties, and which stores actually tell you what it was

If you sell books in more than one country, the number on your royalty report and the number in your bank account are in different currencies, and something had to convert one into the other. That something was the store, using a rate you did not choose and mostly cannot look up afterwards.

Here is the short version. Apple Books publishes the most: it says the rate comes from its bank, that it is typically the spot rate around the payment date, and it shows you the rate it used. Amazon says it converts and that the conversion fees are already baked into the rate, but it never says when the rate is struck. Kobo puts a per line exchange rate right on your sales report, but nowhere in its public help centre does it say where that rate comes from or what day it is from.

That gap matters more than it sounds, because it decides whether you can check the store’s arithmetic or only accept it.

Your sale happens in one currency, your bank account is in another

Start with where the money begins. On Amazon, royalties accrue in the currency of the marketplace where the book sold. The Payment Report help page defines the Accrued Royalty column as the “Royalty amount for your sales in each marketplace, shown in that marketplace’s local currency”, and says tax withholding is applied in that same local currency.

So a month of wide sales is not one number. It is a pile of small numbers in pounds, euros, yen, Canadian dollars and so on. Conversion happens later, on the way to your bank, and that is the step nobody shows their working for.

Apple Books says the most

Apple is the outlier here, in a good way. Its Payments page states where the rate comes from:

“The exchange rates used to convert report currency to your bank account currency is established by our bank and, due to Apple’s volume, is generally a more favorable rate.”

And, unusually, it gives you a timing window:

“The rates are typically the spot rate on the date of payment and no more than three business days prior to the date the proceeds are received into your account.”

Apple also shows you the number. The rate it used appears on the Payments page in an FX Rate column, so you can see after the fact what your euros were turned into. Both quotes are from Apple Books Partner Support: Payments.

The useful consequence is that Apple tells you, in advance, not to trust the pre payment figure:

“Proceeds is an estimate of the amount due based on converting the amount owed to your bank account currency. The actual payment may differ from the proceeds based on variances in foreign exchange rates as well as reductions for applicable withholding taxes.”

That is from Apple’s payments and financial reports page. If you have ever written down Apple’s estimate and then been annoyed when the deposit was a bit different, that sentence is the explanation, and Apple published it before you noticed.

Amazon says it converts, but not when

Amazon’s version is clear about the fact of conversion and quiet about the timing. From the KDP help page on getting paid:

“In countries where royalties are paid in a currency other than the Sale Currency, Amazon will convert the royalties due from the Sale Currency to your payment currency at an exchange rate determined by Amazon, based on rates received from an exchange rate service. This converted amount will be inclusive of all fees associated with the conversion.”

Two things are worth pulling out of that. First, “inclusive of all fees” means there is no separate conversion fee line to find. The cost of converting is inside the rate. You will not see it itemised anywhere, because it is not itemised anywhere. Second, “an exchange rate determined by Amazon” is as specific as it gets. The service is not named.

There is also a small inconsistency in how Amazon describes the source. The help page above says the rate comes from “an exchange rate service”, while the Payment Report page, describing the FX Rate column, says the column “will automatically update once we receive exchange rates from the bank”. A service and a bank are not obviously the same thing. We are not going to pretend to know which is right, but if you are trying to reconcile to the cent, it is worth knowing the documentation points two ways.

The closest Amazon comes to naming a moment is on the Royalties Estimator page:

“Your estimated royalties are based on exchange rates, which fluctuate and will be different at the time of payment.”

“Different at the time of payment” implies the rate lands at payment time rather than sale time, which is the sensible reading, but Amazon never states it outright. So we will not either.

One thing you can actually change on Amazon

This is the most practical fact in this whole post. Amazon’s payment options page says:

“Where EFT is available in the Sale Currency, selecting it allows your royalties to be paid directly in that currency, with no conversion.”

If you hold an account in a currency Amazon can pay you in directly, you can skip a conversion entirely for that marketplace. Worth a look before you assume conversion is unavoidable. Read the currency table on KDP Payment Options before you plan around it, though, because which currencies you can be paid in is keyed to where your bank is, and for most bank locations every marketplace maps to a single payout currency. The same page notes direct deposit “has no minimum payment threshold”, which is a separate and also useful fact.

Kobo shows you the rate and not where it came from

Kobo is the interesting case, because it is simultaneously the most and least transparent.

Most: your monthly sales report carries a per line exchange rate. Kobo’s glossary for the sales report defines a column as the “Foreign Exchange Rate Used to Convert the List Price to your Default Currency”, alongside a COGS in Payable Currency column holding the royalty in that currency. Line by line, you can see the rate that was applied. Apple gives you one rate per payment. Kobo gives you one per row.

Least: that is where the disclosure stops. We read all 106 articles in Kobo Writing Life’s public help centre and searched them for a rate source or a strike date. There is nothing. No named provider, no benchmark, no “rate on the last day of the month”, no spot rate language at all. The column exists, gets populated, and is never explained.

To be fair to Kobo, the full terms of service live behind the author dashboard login, so it is possible the contract says more. We cannot read it, so we are not going to claim it is silent everywhere. What we can say is that the public help centre does not answer the question.

The CAD 50 puzzle

There is a related wrinkle that we genuinely cannot resolve, and it seems worth naming rather than smoothing over.

Kobo pays once you clear a threshold, and its payments article is specific about it:

“Authors are paid 45 days after the end of each monthly period, provided they have met a minimum threshold of CAD $50.”

The threshold is in Canadian dollars. But the same article lists the currencies Kobo actually pays in: “USD, CAD, GBP, EUR, JPY, AUD, NZD, and HKD”, and adds that if your local currency is not on the list, you are paid in USD. So most authors are measured against a bar in one currency and paid in another. Which rate converts your earnings to test them against that CAD 50 bar, and on what date, is not published anywhere we could find.

For most months this is academic. If you are hovering right around the threshold, it is the difference between getting paid this month and waiting.

What this means when you reconcile

Put the three together and a rule falls out.

You cannot rebuild the store’s number from a public exchange rate. Not because the stores are hiding something, but because the rate that produced your deposit was struck by their bank, on their schedule, with their fees folded in. If you look up a rate on a currency site and multiply, you will get a number that is close and wrong, and then you will spend an evening hunting a discrepancy that was never a discrepancy.

So the honest way to reconcile is to use the converted figures the store hands you. Apple gives you an FX Rate on the payment. Kobo gives you a rate per line. Amazon gives you an FX Rate column that fills in once the rate arrives. Those are the numbers that actually produced the money, and they are the only ones that will ever tie out.

This is the rule the tool we are building follows too. It reads the store’s own converted figures rather than looking up a rate of its own, because that is the rate that produced your deposit. It also means there is nothing to look up online, which is the point of a tool that runs on your own machine.

A short month end checklist

If you want something practical to take away:

1. Pull each store’s report and note which currency each line is in before you add anything up. Mixing currencies by accident is the most common way a reconciliation goes wrong.
2. Find the store’s own rate. Apple’s FX Rate on the payment, Kobo’s per line rate on the sales report, Amazon’s FX Rate column on the Payment Report.
3. Use their converted figure as the truth, not your own conversion.
4. Expect the estimate and the deposit to differ. Apple says so in writing. Amazon says estimates “will be different at the time of payment”.
5. If you are near Kobo’s CAD 50 threshold, treat a quiet month as deferred rather than missing. The earnings carry over.

Currency is only one of the reasons a deposit disagrees with a report. Payment timing, returns landing in a later month, tax withholding and thresholds all do it too, and we wrote up the schedules and the traps store by store in when each store actually pays you.

We are building a local first desktop tool that does this monthly reconciliation for you, using the stores’ own numbers, with nothing leaving your computer. You can see what it does and where it is up to on the Royalty Desk page.

Every figure and quote in this post was taken from the store’s own help pages on 17 September 2026 and is linked above. Stores change these pages without notice, so check the source before you make a decision on it.