central-bank-mcp is an MCP server provided by AllRatesToday, with the goal of enabling AI assistants to obtain "official exchange rates"—that is, rates formally published by central banks and tax authorities, which are fixed once published and carry the publishing institution's own publication date. These are exactly the figures required by tax authorities, audits, and customs, rather than real-time market mid-market rates. It is independent of the real-time mid-market rate server @allratestoday/mcp-server in the same series; the two may differ by several percentage points and must be chosen according to purpose.
Main capabilities: covers 121 central banks and 3 tax authorities (ECB, Fed, Bank of Japan, SNB, RBI, HMRC, US Treasury, etc.), each sourced from its own published tables; supports querying any specified date, falling back to the legally effective rate on weekends and holidays, and informing the applicable publication date in the response; supports cross-institution comparison, returning in a single call each institution's rate for a currency pair along with min/max/median and spread statistics; for currency pairs not directly published by an institution, performs cross-calculations only within that institution's own table and marks them as derived, never mixing data from different institutions; provides five focused tools to facilitate correct use by models.
Usage: can be installed with zero configuration, requiring no API key to start, connect, and answer questions about the latest published tables. The no-key mode reads the open /api/open/central-bank/{bank} endpoint. It is free to use but requires retaining an attribution link to allratestoday.com. After registering and verifying an email, a free API key (format art_live_xxxxx) is available, used in configuration as ALLRATES_API_KEY, unlocking historical dates, time series, cross-institution comparisons, and the publication calendar; the free quota covers the latest published tables and light historical usage, while deep history and dated tables require a paid plan. If using Claude Code, its plugin can be installed instead of manual configuration; the plugin bundles two MCP servers, two skills, and five slash commands (/rate, /convert, /official-rate, /fx-history, /add-currency-support). A hosted endpoint is also provided https://allratestoday.com/api/mcp（Streamable HTTP). Clients that support remote MCP can paste the URL to use it, and keyless mode is likewise supported; with a key, connection is possible via Authorization: Bearer art_live_… or the URL parameter api_key, and the registry name is com.allratestoday/mcp.
Use cases: for users who need to perform compliance, tax, accounting, customs declaration, and auditing based on official exchange rates, for example querying "ECB's official USD/EUR rate today," "what rate does HMRC apply to a certain March invoice," "show the Bank of Japan's daily official exchange rates for Q1," "compare the official exchange rates of all central banks that publish USD/LKR." Supports Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop, Windsurf, and any MCP 1.x-compatible client, using stdio transport. After installation, restart the client for it to take effect, and it can be verified by asking "Which central banks can you get official exchange rates from?" Only request parameters and the API key are sent to allratestoday.com; conversation context is not transmitted.
Limitations: the service returns officially published exchange rates rather than real-time market mid-market rates; keyless mode only covers the latest published tables and carries an attribution requirement; historical dates, time series, cross-institution comparisons, and the publication calendar require an API key, and deep history and dated tables require a paid plan; the project uses the MIT license.
