Part 1 of 9
Where to exchange money in Erbil: Ronaki, Nishtiman and the offices that publish a board
Erbil is the only Iraqi city where several exchange offices publish their board online every day. Where they are, how they quote, and what to check before you walk in.
Erbil is where DinarView’s market rate begins. Two of the three boards the site reads every ten minutes are in this city, and no other Iraqi city has more exchange offices that put their prices online. If you are changing dollars, euros or Turkish lira48.78+0.22% in Erbil, you can know the price before you leave the house, which is not yet true anywhere else in the country.
Three places the offices cluster
Ronaki. A block of exchange companies opposite the Haji Sulaiman Qassab mosque. Khaki Shaqlawa and Qamar Al-Fajr sit next door to each other here, and both publish a board: Khaki’s is on its homepage and updates every morning; Qamar’s is a rates page on its own site. Because the two are neighbours, their buy and sell rarely differ by more than a few hundred dinars per $100, and the spread between them is a fair picture of the whole street.
Nishtiman. The Nishtiman building is the city’s newer bourse, where money-transfer companies from Baghdad have opened Erbil branches. Al-Fanjan’s Erbil office is here. These offices are set up for transfers and travel dollars as much as for cash exchange, so ask which service you want before you ask the price.
100 Metre Street and the Italian Village side. Gailany’s office is in the Empire Diamond Towers on 100 Metre Street, with a 24-hour ATM outside; Tekan’s two branches are on the English Village road; NH Exchange is in the Rami Tower in the Italian Village. Gailany publishes a live board with history charts, which is why it is one of DinarView’s sources.
The offices DinarView lists
Every office below is a real business from the September 2026 census. A tick in the directory means DinarView reads that office’s board; the others are listed as places to go, with no quote.
| Office | Area | Board online | Phone | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Khaki Shaqlawa | Ronaki | Yes, read by DinarView | +964 750 205 0505 | 09:00–20:00 daily |
| Gailany | 100 Metre Street | Yes, read by DinarView | +964 750 829 2805 | Office hours; ATM 24 h |
| Qamar Al-Fajr | Ronaki | Yes, not yet readable | 0751 3000 120 | Daily |
| Tekan | English Village Road | Yes, not updated since June | +964 750 369 7777 | 09:30–21:00, Friday closed |
| Al-Fanjan | Nishtiman | No | +964 780 900 0072 | Daily |
| Fastline | City centre | No | +964 750 772 3400 | Daily |
| NH Exchange | Italian Village | No | +964 750 666 3525 | Daily |
| Al-Quttaf | Gulan Street | No | — | Daily |
The full list, with maps and the current quote for the offices that have one, is on the Erbil page.
How Erbil quotes the dollar
Erbil boards quote the dinar per $100, not per dollar. A board that says 154,600 buy and 154,650 sell means the office pays 154,600 dinars for your hundred-dollar note and sells one for 154,650. DinarView’s home page can show either unit; the boards themselves only ever show the hundred.
Every other currency on an Erbil board is quoted against the dollar, not the dinar. The euro appears as dollars per 100 euros, the Turkish lira as lira per 100 dollars, the Swedish krona161.43+0.49% per 1,000. If you want a euro-to-dinar figure, the office does the two steps in its head and so does DinarView, which is why the euro row on this site is marked as a cross through the dollar.
The spread in Ronaki is narrow. On an ordinary day the gap between an office’s buy and sell is 50 to 200 dinars per $100, a small fraction of one percent. The gap between Erbil’s market rate and the Central Bank’s official 1,310 per dollar is the much larger number, currently around 18 percent, and it is the reason a rate board exists at all.
Before you go
- Check the day’s board first. Khaki and Gailany publish before the offices open. If the price you are quoted at the counter is worse than the board by more than the usual spread, say so; the board is the office’s own number.
- Bring clean, new-series notes. Offices across Iraq pay less for older or marked dollar notes, and some refuse them. The board price is for the current series in good condition.
- Fridays. Tekan closes on Friday; Khaki opens daily. DinarView’s collector reads the boards at noon on Friday only, because prices rarely move on the closed day.
- Large amounts. Above a few thousand dollars, offices will quote a better rate than the board if you ask, and may need identification. Transfers to Baghdad or abroad go through the transfer companies in Nishtiman rather than the cash counters in Ronaki.
What DinarView shows for Erbil
The Erbil figure on this site is the median of the fresh boards the collector can read. Today that is two boards; when a board is more than three percent away from the others it is set aside, and when only one board is fresh the figure is labelled indicative. The sources are named under the number, with the buy and sell each one published. Nothing on the Erbil page is estimated.
A worked example: $500 on Ronaki
Take the boards on the morning this guide was written: buy 154,600 and sell 154,650 per $100 at Khaki, with Gailany a few tens of dinars either side. Five hundred-dollar notes sold at the counter bring 773,000 dinars. Buying the same five notes back an hour later costs 773,250, so the round trip costs 250 dinars, about a sixth of one percent. That is what a narrow spread means in practice: the office is not where you lose money in Erbil. The place you lose it is the official window you cannot use. At 1,310 per dollar the same $500 would be worth 655,000 dinars, 118,000 less, and every board on Ronaki exists to price that gap in public.
Do the arithmetic the other way when you are buying dollars for travel. A visitor who needs $1,000 for a flight pays 1,546,500 dinars on the street. The office will round to the nearest thousand and may ask for the odd 500 in coins it does not have, so bring the sum in 25,000-dinar notes and expect a small rounding in the office’s favour.
Erbil’s other currencies
Khaki’s board carries fourteen currencies and the diaspora is why. Erbil families have relatives in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Britain and Australia, and money comes home in kronor, pounds and euros as much as in dollars. The board quotes the Scandinavian currencies per 1,000 units against the dollar, and the euro and pound per 100, so a reader working out what a Swedish pension is worth in dinars has two steps to do and a rounding at each. DinarView’s rate board does the steps for you and marks the result as a cross through the dollar. On the street, a euro or a pound fetches almost exactly its dollar value multiplied by the day’s dollar price; the office’s margin on the cross is another 100 to 200 dinars per $100 of value, which is the price of not carrying dollars.
Questions readers ask
Is the rate the same across Erbil? Almost. Ronaki, Nishtiman and 100 Metre Street quote within a few hundred dinars per $100 of each other on the same morning. Airport and hotel counters are the exception and are worse.
Can I buy dollars at the official rate in Erbil? Not at these offices. The official 1,310 is available only through bank channels for approved purposes and travel; the offices in this guide trade at the market rate.
Which board should I trust when two differ? Neither is wrong; each is that office’s own price. DinarView’s median is the fair middle, and the city page shows both so you can pick the better side for your direction.