7 Best APIs for Historical rates in Nigeria

XE Currency Data API delivers enterprise-grade foreign exchange rate data from XE, the world most trusted currency authority with over 300 million users globally. XE has been publishing currency data since 1993 and has built its reputation on the accuracy and reliability of its mid-market exchange rates. The XE Currency Data API extends this trusted rate data to developers and enterprises who need audit-grade FX information for financial systems, banking applications, ERP platforms, and compliance reporting. XE mid-market rates represent the midpoint between buy and sell prices in the global forex market, sourced from aggregated quotes across the global interbank market. These mid-market rates serve as the internationally recognized reference point for currency conversions in financial reporting, audit, and compliance contexts. Many Nigerian financial institutions, accounting firms, and corporate treasury teams use XE rates specifically because XE is recognized as a credible, independent source that satisfies auditor and regulator expectations for rate substantiation. The Nigerian Naira is fully supported across all XE Currency Data endpoints. Given the Naira's significant volatility in recent years and the importance of accurate NGN rates for Nigerian businesses with international operations, XE's multi-source rate aggregation methodology provides better rate accuracy than single-source alternatives. Nigerian importers, exporters, and companies with foreign currency debt obligations particularly benefit from rate data that accurately captures current market conditions. Real-time rate delivery ensures that XE Currency Data always reflects the current state of global forex markets. Rates are updated continuously throughout the trading day as market prices move. For Nigerian payment processors, money transfer operators, and foreign exchange bureaux integrating XE rates into customer-facing pricing, the currency rate freshness directly affects the quality of the rates presented to customers and the accuracy of the margins being applied. Historical rate data is available going back many years, enabling retrospective financial calculations and reporting. Nigerian companies preparing financial statements under IFRS, which requires foreign currency transactions to be recorded at transaction-date exchange rates, can use XE historical rates to retrieve the rate that applied on any specific past date. This historical accuracy is critical for audit compliance where the company must be able to substantiate the exchange rates used in financial reporting. The convert endpoint performs currency conversions using XE rates, accepting source currency, target currency, and amount. For applications where only the converted amount is needed rather than the underlying rate, this endpoint simplifies implementation. The API also supports retrieving rate information for a specific list of currency pairs rather than the full currency matrix, optimizing bandwidth for applications with defined currency requirements. XE Currency Data integrates with the full XE product ecosystem. Customers using XE for business money transfers can ensure their operational systems and their FX data layer are using consistent, source-consistent rates. For Nigerian companies that use XE for international payments alongside their own applications, this alignment eliminates discrepancies between system-calculated rates and actual transfer rates. The API is offered through paid subscription plans starting at accessible monthly rates for smaller usage volumes and scaling to enterprise contracts for high-volume financial applications. All plans include access to XE's trusted mid-market rates, historical data, and support from XE's team. Nigerian enterprises with specific data requirements or integration support needs can access dedicated account management through enterprise plans. The REST API uses API key authentication with JSON responses. Comprehensive documentation, SDKs for popular programming languages, and integration guides make implementation straightforward for Nigerian development teams building currency-aware financial applications across banking, fintech, trade finance, and ERP integration contexts.

Frankfurter is a free, open-source currency exchange rates API built on top of official European Central Bank reference exchange rate data. The project delivers ECB foreign exchange rates through a clean, modern REST API with no registration requirement, no API key, and no rate limits documented — offering a completely frictionless entry point for developers who need reliable currency conversion data powered by one of the world most authoritative central bank rate sources. The European Central Bank publishes official reference exchange rates for 32 currencies against the Euro on each business day at approximately 16:00 CET. These reference rates are computed from the aggregate of market rates reported by financial institutions across the eurozone, making them the official benchmark for euro currency conversions in European financial reporting and compliance contexts. Frankfurter exposes these ECB rates through a straightforward REST API that makes accessing them as simple as an HTTP GET request. The latest rates endpoint returns the most recently published ECB exchange rate set for all supported currencies relative to any specified base currency. By default, rates are base EUR, but any supported currency can be used as the base by specifying it in the request parameter. This flexibility allows applications to retrieve NGN/USD, EUR/GBP, or any other combination without client-side conversion math. The response is a clean JSON object with ISO 4217 currency codes as keys and decimal rate values. Historical rates are accessible for any date from January 4, 1999, when the ECB began publishing its reference rates, through the present. This exceptional historical depth of over 25 years of official ECB rates supports the most demanding historical analysis use cases. Nigerian financial researchers studying the long-term trajectory of major currencies, academics modeling currency relationships, or developers building historical FX analysis tools for Nigerian businesses with international exposure can query any specific date or date range within this extensive archive. Time series queries retrieve exchange rates across a date range in a single request, returning a day-by-day array of rate sets between the start and end dates. This is more efficient than making individual date queries for each day in a range and enables building currency trend charts, calculating moving averages, or analyzing rate volatility across specific periods of interest. A currency conversion endpoint simplifies the most common use case by accepting an amount, source currency, and target currency and returning the converted amount directly. This eliminates client-side conversion logic for applications where only the final converted value is needed. It is important to note that Frankfurter covers 32 currencies, and the Nigerian Naira is not among them. The ECB reference rate set covers major traded currencies primarily from developed markets. For applications specifically needing NGN exchange rates, a dedicated currency API with NGN support would be more appropriate. However, for Nigerian businesses primarily working with EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, JPY, and other major ECB-covered currencies, Frankfurter provides official-quality rate data at zero cost. The open-source nature of Frankfurter means the complete server-side codebase is publicly available. Organizations requiring guaranteed availability, data sovereignty, or control over the rate data pipeline can self-host Frankfurter on their own infrastructure, fetching directly from the ECB and serving through their own API endpoint. This self-hosting option is particularly relevant for Nigerian financial institutions subject to regulatory requirements about external data dependencies. For Nigerian developers building personal finance tools, business productivity applications, or learning projects involving international currency handling, Frankfurter offers immediate, zero-cost access to authoritative exchange rate data that is suitable for display and educational purposes without the overhead of account management.

FxRatesAPI is a foreign exchange rate data provider offering real-time, historical, and time-series exchange rate data for over 180 currencies through a clean REST API. The service aggregates rates from multiple financial data sources and delivers accurate exchange rates for currency conversion, price display, accounting, and financial analytics applications. For Nigerian developers and businesses building applications that deal with multiple currencies — which describes the majority of Nigerian fintech, e-commerce, and accounting software — FxRatesAPI provides reliable NGN currency data alongside all major global currencies. Nigeria's position as Africa's largest economy means that currency exchange rates are not just a technical feature — they are a core business concern. The USD/NGN exchange rate directly affects the cost of imported goods displayed on Nigerian e-commerce platforms, the naira value of remittances sent from Nigerians in the diaspora, the financial reporting of Nigerian companies with foreign currency revenues, and the investment decisions of Nigerians holding foreign currency assets. An accurate, current USD/NGN rate, updated at least daily, is a fundamental requirement for dozens of categories of Nigerian applications. The /latest endpoint returns current exchange rates for all 180+ supported currencies from a specified base currency. To get the current USD/NGN rate, a Nigerian application calls the endpoint with base=USD and receives the NGN rate in the response. The same call returns rates for EUR, GBP, JPY, and every other supported currency simultaneously — making it straightforward to build multi-currency displays that show prices in multiple currencies at once. The /convert endpoint handles currency conversion arithmetic — pass the amount, the source currency, and the target currency, and FxRatesAPI returns the converted amount at the current rate. For Nigerian e-commerce platforms that need to convert a product price from USD to NGN for display, this eliminates client-side conversion code and ensures the rate used is always current. Historical exchange rate data is available via the /historical endpoint, returning rates for any past date. This is critical for Nigerian accounting and ERP applications that need to record transactions at the exchange rate on the transaction date — a requirement for Nigerian financial reporting that must comply with both IFRS standards and FIRS (Federal Inland Revenue Service) guidelines on foreign currency transactions. The /timeseries endpoint returns exchange rate data over a range of dates with daily resolution, enabling trend analysis and charting. For Nigerian currency analytics tools, this data powers time-series charts showing the USD/NGN rate history — valuable context for Nigerians trying to understand naira depreciation trends and optimize their currency holding decisions. Fluctuation data via the /fluctuation endpoint shows the change in exchange rates over a specified period — useful for Nigerian fintech apps that want to display "the naira weakened 2.3% against the dollar this week" type of contextual information alongside current rates. The free plan provides 1,500 requests per month with daily rate resolution — sufficient for low-traffic applications where real-time rates are not critical. For applications needing hourly or minute-level rate updates (forex comparison tools, live price displays on high-traffic Nigerian e-commerce sites), the Basic plan at $9.99/month provides up to 100,000 requests and hourly resolution. The Professional plan at $29.99/month provides minute-level resolution and up to 1 million requests per month — appropriate for Nigerian fintech applications with significant user traffic. All endpoints accept a simple api_key query parameter with no request signing required, making FxRatesAPI one of the quickest currency data integrations available for Nigerian developers. Responses are JSON by default with XML available as an alternative format.

CurrencyFreaks is a foreign exchange rate API providing real-time and historical currency data for over 150 global currencies, with particular value for Nigerian developers and businesses needing reliable Naira exchange rate data. The service aggregates rates from multiple financial data sources to deliver accurate mid-market rates with consistent uptime, making it a dependable choice for fintech applications, payment systems, and currency-aware business software. The API delivers current exchange rates across all supported currency pairs, with rates refreshed regularly throughout the trading day to track market movements. For applications where currency rate freshness matters — such as payment processing, order pricing, or customer-facing currency displays — CurrencyFreaks provides the up-to-date data needed to reflect actual market conditions rather than stale approximations. The Nigerian Naira is among the supported currencies, ensuring NGN/USD, NGN/EUR, NGN/GBP, and other critical Naira pairs are available for Nigerian applications. Historical exchange rate data is available from 2000 onwards, giving developers access to over two decades of FX rate history. This extensive archive is valuable for multiple use cases: financial modeling that requires long-term currency trend analysis, accounting systems that need to reconstruct historical transaction values at the exchange rates prevailing at the time of each transaction, and research applications analyzing the relationship between currency movements and economic events in Nigeria and globally. The historical depth is particularly significant for Nigerian context. The Naira has experienced several major devaluation episodes since 2000, including the 2016 exchange rate liberalization, the 2023 unification of official and parallel market rates, and subsequent volatility. Applications built for Nigerian financial analysis, research, or compliance can access the complete historical rate record through CurrencyFreaks to accurately model and document the impact of these exchange rate changes on business performance or asset values. Currency conversion is directly supported through a dedicated convert endpoint. Rather than retrieving raw rates and performing conversion on the client side, applications can submit a source currency, target currency, and amount and receive back the converted value. This simplifies integration for applications where only conversion functionality is needed, such as product pricing widgets, invoice currency selectors, or quick calculator features. For Nigerian e-commerce platforms running multicurrency storefronts, CurrencyFreaks enables automatic price adjustment in multiple currencies based on live rates. When a Nigerian business displays prices in USD for international customers or in GBP for diaspora buyers, using live rates ensures the foreign currency price accurately reflects the current Naira equivalent, protecting the business from pricing errors due to rate movements. Remittance service providers and mobile money platforms operating in Nigeria rely on accurate FX data to calculate and display the Naira amount recipients will receive. Compliance and transparency requirements in the Nigerian financial services sector mean that displayed rates must be accurate and traceable. CurrencyFreaks provides the rate data foundation while applications handle the display and audit trail requirements. The API uses simple API key authentication included in request query parameters or headers. The JSON response format is clean and consistent, with currency codes following ISO 4217 standards for interoperability. The free plan provides 1,000 monthly requests — sufficient for development, testing, and low-traffic applications — while paid plans scale up request limits to accommodate production workloads. Nigerian developers benefit from a straightforward onboarding process requiring only email registration to obtain a working API key.

Fixer.io is one of the most widely used foreign exchange rate APIs in the developer community, providing real-time and historical exchange rate data for over 170 currencies with a track record of reliability that has made it a trusted foundation for thousands of commercial financial applications globally. Built and maintained by APilayer, Fixer.io has evolved from a simple ECB rate proxy into a comprehensive FX data service aggregating rates from financial data providers with global coverage. The API provides a latest rates endpoint that returns current exchange rates for all supported currencies against a specified base currency. On the free plan, EUR is the only available base currency — reflecting Fixer.io's origins as an ECB rate service — but paid plans unlock any currency as base including the Nigerian Naira, US Dollar, British Pound, and all other supported currencies. For Nigerian applications where showing Naira as the base currency matters for user experience, upgrading to a paid plan enables NGN-based rate tables that are immediately intuitive to Nigerian users. Historical rates are accessible through a date parameter that retrieves the exchange rates that were in effect on any past date. Fixer.io maintains an extensive historical database covering many years of past rates, enabling applications to reconstruct the Naira exchange rate history, calculate the cost of historical foreign currency transactions, or build trend analysis features. Nigerian accountants and financial controllers preparing comparative financial statements need accurate historical rates for the periods being compared, and Fixer.io provides this data reliably. The time-series endpoint enables querying exchange rates across a date range, returning rates for each day between the start and end dates in a single API response. This time-series data powers trend charts, moving average calculations, and volatility analysis. For Nigerian financial professionals analyzing currency trends to inform hedging decisions or procurement timing, time-series data provides the raw material for meaningful analysis without requiring day-by-day API queries. The fluctuation endpoint is a unique Fixer.io feature that returns the change in exchange rates between two dates, expressing both absolute change and percentage change for each currency. For Nigerian import businesses monitoring how the Naira has moved against supplier currencies over a given period, the fluctuation endpoint provides a direct comparison without requiring the client application to calculate differences from raw rate data. Currency conversion is directly supported through a dedicated convert endpoint that accepts source and target currency codes and an amount, returning the converted value calculated at current rates. This endpoint streamlines implementation for applications where only the final converted amount is needed rather than access to the underlying rate data. Fixer.io is available through a freemium model where the free plan provides access to the core functionality with EUR as the only base currency. Professional plans unlock additional base currencies including NGN, increase request frequency, and enable access to historical data, time-series, and fluctuation endpoints. The pricing is transparent and competitive with comparable FX data services, making it accessible for Nigerian fintech startups at various stages of growth. Nigerian payment processors, fintech platforms, accounting software vendors, and e-commerce developers have deployed Fixer.io as the exchange rate data backbone for their products. The API's extensive documentation, code samples in multiple languages, and the large developer community means that integration questions have usually already been answered in forums and documentation. API key authentication with straightforward query parameters and consistent JSON responses makes Fixer.io one of the fastest currency APIs to integrate into new Nigerian applications.