The figure that gets quoted in almost every article about foreign exchange market size comes from one publication, and it is worth knowing exactly which vintage you are quoting. The Bank for International Settlements published preliminary results of its 14th Triennial Central Bank Survey on 30 September 2025, covering turnover in April 2025. Global OTC FX turnover reached $9.6 trillion per day, up 28% from the $7.5 trillion recorded in the 2022 survey.
That number is three years newer than the one still circulating on most broker blogs, and it is not the last word. BIS states explicitly that the data are subject to revision. Complete turnover data and several analytical articles were released with the December 2025 BIS Quarterly Review, and final turnover figures together with the FX settlement data followed in June 2026. Anyone using these numbers in a report should check which vintage they are reading.
Disclosure: no affiliate links and no payment for signups on this page. All figures were read from the BIS statistical release "OTC foreign exchange turnover in April 2025", the BIS Triennial 2025 survey pages and the June 2026 BIS Quarterly Review special feature on settlement risk, on 15 September 2026. Where a figure could not be traced to a BIS primary source, it is not printed here.
Central banks and other authorities in 52 jurisdictions collected data from more than 1,100 banks and other dealers, then reported national aggregates to the BIS for consolidation. The survey has been run every three years since 1986 for FX markets, and is coordinated by the BIS under the auspices of the Markets Committee with support from the G20 Data Gaps Initiative.
Three features of the method change how you read the output. Turnover is reported by the sales desks of reporting dealers regardless of where the trade is executed, so a trade booked in London counts as London activity even if the matching engine sits elsewhere. It is reported on an unconsolidated basis, which means trades between related entities in the same banking group are included. And central banks themselves are not part of the reporting population.
The reporting population is large international dealers. It is not a census of every entity that touches a currency.
The composition of that $9.6 trillion shifted more than the headline growth rate suggests. Spot and outright forwards grew far faster than swaps, and the shares moved accordingly.
| Instrument | April 2025 turnover | Share 2025 | Share 2022 | Change in turnover |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FX swaps | $4 trillion | 42% | 51% | +5% |
| Spot | $3 trillion | 31% | 28% | +42% |
| Outright forwards | $1.8 trillion | 19% | 15% | +60% |
| FX options | not separately stated in the release | 7% | 4% | more than doubled |
| Currency swaps | stable | around 2% | around 2% | broadly unchanged |
FX swaps remain the single largest instrument at $4 trillion, but their share fell to 42%, the lowest since the 2010 survey, purely because everything else grew faster. The BIS attributes the 60% jump in outright forwards to hedging activity in a specific window: elevated FX volatility and dollar depreciation following trade policy announcements early in April 2025, with institutional investors and asset managers selling dollars forward to limit further losses on dollar asset exposures.
This matters for anyone treating the survey as a steady-state benchmark. April 2025 was a stress month, and the BIS says so directly.
One more line item deserves attention. The 2025 survey continues to break out "non-market-facing" trades, meaning back-to-back trades that automatically follow customer deals to shift risk across sales desks, plus compression trades. These amounted to $1.2 trillion, or 13% of global turnover, up slightly from 12% in 2022. They are reported separately because they do not contribute to price formation.
This is the part almost every summary gets wrong, including professional ones. The BIS publishes turnover on two bases, defined in the footnotes to the release. Figures on a "net-net" basis are corrected for both local and cross-border inter-dealer double-counting. Figures on a "net-gross" basis are corrected for local inter-dealer double-counting only.
The $9.6 trillion headline is net-net. The geographical distribution table is net-gross.
So the shares in the country table do not sit on the same denominator as the headline total, and adding them to instrument shares produces a number that means nothing. If you are building a chart, take every input from the same table, or state the basis next to each figure.
The practical test is simple. A country share is a measure of where sales desks sit, not of how much end-user activity originates there.
Every FX trade has two sides, so currency shares total 200% across all currencies. This is the single most common misreading of the survey, and it is why the USD share has hovered near 88% for a decade rather than near 44%.
| Currency | Share of turnover, April 2025 | Share, April 2022 | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| US dollar | 89.2% | 88.4% | up |
| Euro | 28.9% | 30.6% | down |
| Japanese yen | 16.8% | 16.8% | flat |
| Pound sterling | 10.2% | 12.9% | down sharply |
| Chinese renminbi | 8.5% | 7.0% | up |
| Swiss franc | 6.4% | 5.2% | up, now sixth |
| Hong Kong dollar | 3.8% | 2.6% | up |
Note that the 2022 column here differs slightly from what the 2022 press release originally reported, because the BIS revises historical series. If a source quotes EUR at 31% or GBP at 13% for 2022, it is using the original vintage.
All ten of the most traded currency pairs involve the US dollar. The pairs that grew fastest were USD/CNY, up 59% to 8.1% of global turnover, USD/CHF, up 60% to 4.9%, and USD/HKD, up 95% to 3.6%. Whatever else the data say, they do not describe a market moving away from the dollar.
The renminbi's rise to 8.5% continues a trend the BIS dates back to 2013, and the December 2025 Review includes a dedicated box on renminbi-driven growth in emerging market currency trading.
The counterparty breakdown is where retail readers most often misread the survey, because "non-financial customers" sounds like it means individuals.
| Counterparty | Share 2025 | Share 2022 |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting dealers (inter-dealer) | 46%, $4.4 trillion | 47% |
| Other financial institutions | 50%, $4.8 trillion | 47% |
| of which non-reporting banks | 24%, $2.4 trillion | 21% |
| of which institutional investors | 13%, $1.3 trillion | 11% |
| of which hedge funds and proprietary trading firms | 8% | 7% |
| Non-financial customers | 5% | 6% |
"Other financial institutions" is a broad category that includes smaller regional banks, institutional investors, hedge funds, proprietary trading firms and official sector institutions. "Non-financial customers" means corporates, and it has been shrinking as a share for three consecutive surveys, from 7% in 2019 to 6% in 2022 to 5% in 2025. The BIS adds a caveat: corporates may route FX through financial affiliates, which would land in the other bucket instead.
Retail is not a category in this table and the BIS does not publish a retail share. Any figure you see for retail FX as a percentage of global turnover, including the frequently repeated "under 5%", is not from this survey.
Sales desks in the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore and Hong Kong SAR intermediated 75% of total FX trading in April 2025, on a net-gross basis. The UK retained first place at approximately 38%, followed by the United States at approximately 19%. The notable mover was Singapore, which reached 11.8% of the total, up from 9.5% in 2022, while Hong Kong held steady at 7.0%.
Cross-border trading accounted for 63% of global turnover, up from 62% in 2022. Concentration at this level is a resilience question as much as a market structure statistic: the December 2025 Review includes a box on non-visible trading and FX liquidity conditions in April 2025, which is the natural follow-up read.
Settlement risk is the risk that one party delivers the currency it sold and never receives the currency it bought. It is named after Bankhaus Herstatt, which was closed by German authorities on 26 June 1974 after its New York correspondent had already suspended outgoing dollar payments, leaving counterparties exposed for the full value of marks they had paid earlier that day. CLS, which provides a payment-versus-payment service eliminating the risk, launched in 2002.
The 2025 Triennial Survey categorised settlement amounts by the method used, on a methodology developed for the Markets Committee by the Global Foreign Exchange Committee with the CPMI, central banks and the BIS. The results, published in the June 2026 BIS Quarterly Review: just over $5 trillion, or 36% of average daily settlement, went through PvP and eliminated settlement risk. A further $7.6 trillion, or 54%, used methods such as pre-settlement netting that mitigate but do not eliminate it. More than $1.4 trillion, or 10%, settled on a gross bilateral basis and was fully exposed.
So 90% of daily settlement now sits on methods that eliminate or reduce the risk, and 10% does not. The BIS notes that the reasons are mostly structural: counterparties without access to a PvP system, and currency pairs or trade types that PvP does not cover.
Four exclusions matter more than the inclusions for most readers of this site.
Separately, the December 2022 Review by Borio, McCauley and McGuire found that FX swaps, forwards and currency swaps create future dollar payment obligations that do not appear on balance sheets, described at the time as more than $80 trillion worldwide. That is a 2022 analysis of off-balance-sheet dollar debt, not a line item in the 2025 turnover release, and it should be cited as such.
Every figure above is downloadable, and checking it takes a few minutes.
That fourth step is the one that separates a usable citation from a wrong one.
Used properly, the Triennial Survey is the best available map of the institutional FX market. Used as a marketing statistic, it becomes a number that proves nothing.
This article explains a statistical publication. It is not investment advice and it is not a recommendation to trade foreign exchange or crypto assets. Leveraged products carry substantial risk of loss. Figures cited here come from BIS releases that are subject to revision, and you should confirm the current vintage before relying on them.