Inside the FX market: what the BIS Triennial Survey tells us

The foreign exchange market has no exchange and no single record of what trades. The best picture comes from the Bank for International Settlements’ Triennial Central Bank Survey. Every three years, central banks and monetary authorities collect data on a month’s trading from the banks and dealers in their jurisdictions, and the BIS combines it into a global view. The 2025 survey covered April 2025, drew on 52 jurisdictions and collected data from more than 1,100 banks and other dealers.

Here is what it shows.

How big the market is

The BIS’s preliminary results, published on 30 September 2025, put average daily FX turnover at $9.6 trillion in April 2025, up 28% from $7.5 trillion in April 2022. The final detailed tables, published in 2026, give a figure of about $9.5 trillion. Either way, it was the largest turnover the survey has recorded.

Context matters when reading that number. The BIS noted that April 2025 saw elevated volatility and a surge in trading after trade policy announcements by major jurisdictions early in the month. Some of the growth reflects that unusual month rather than a steady trend, including a jump in hedging through outright forwards by institutional investors with dollar exposure.

The figures are also adjusted for double counting. When two reporting dealers trade with each other, both report the trade; the BIS removes the duplicate so the headline measures each trade once.

What gets traded

Spot trading, which most retail traders think of as “the FX market”, is not the largest part.

• FX swaps remained the most traded instrument, at about $4 trillion a day, or around 42% of turnover. These combine a spot exchange with a reverse forward exchange, and are used heavily by banks and investors to manage funding and hedging.
• Spot accounted for about $3 trillion a day, around 31%, up from 28% in 2022.
• Outright forwards were about $1.8 trillion, roughly 19%, after growing by around 60% since 2022.
• FX options more than doubled compared with 2022 and made up about 7%.
• Currency swaps were a small share, below 2%.

Which currencies

The dollar’s position is overwhelming. It was on one side of 89% of all trades in April 2025, slightly higher than in 2022. Because every trade involves two currencies, shares add up to 200%, not 100%.

The euro followed with a share of just under 29%, then the yen at about 17% and sterling at about 10%. The Chinese renminbi continued to rise, to roughly 8.5%, and the Swiss franc moved up to sixth place.

By currency pair, the final tables show EUR/USD as the most traded, at about a fifth of global turnover. USD/JPY came next at about 14%, followed by USD/CNY at around 8% and GBP/USD at about 7.5%. The BIS noted that all of the ten most traded pairs involve the dollar.

The dollar is on one side of almost nine in every ten currency trades.

Where it is traded

Trading is concentrated in a handful of centres. Sales desks in the UK accounted for 37.8% of global FX trading, with the US at about 19%, Singapore at 11.8% and Hong Kong at 7%. Those four jurisdictions together made up three-quarters of the market. Singapore’s share rose from 9.5% in 2022, strengthening its position as the leading Asian centre.

These figures measure where trades are booked by sales desks, not where the clients are. A fund in Frankfurt or a company in São Paulo may well trade through a desk in London or New York.

Who is trading

About half of turnover was between reporting dealers and other financial institutions, a group that includes smaller banks, institutional investors, hedge funds and principal trading firms. Trading between dealers themselves made up most of the rest, and trading with non-financial companies accounted for only about 5%.

The detailed tables also include two measures of interest to the retail and brokerage industry. Prime-brokered trades averaged about $2.2 trillion a day. Trades identified as retail-driven, meaning those originating from retail aggregators and platforms, were about $242 billion a day, around 2.5% of the total.

Why it matters

For traders, the survey explains several everyday facts: why dollar pairs dominate liquidity, why the hours when London and New York are both open carry so much weight, and why a handful of banks and centres shape conditions for everyone. For brokers and liquidity providers, it is the closest thing the industry has to a census.

On the usual three-year cycle, the next survey will cover April 2028.