NBE’s Rescheduled Auction Clears at a Record 158 Birr, Leaving Half the Banks Empty-Handed
A week after an unexplained cancellation, the central bank’s resumed special FX auction cleared at the weakest rate the birr has posted, while demand for dollars came in more than double the supply on offer.
On Tuesday, June 16, the National Bank of Ethiopia finally completed the special foreign exchange auction that had originally been scheduled for a week earlier. The central bank allotted USD 100 million at a weighted average rate of 158.0000 birr per dollar, the highest clearing rate the special auction series has produced. Commercial banks submitted bids worth USD 236.3 million, more than double the amount on offer, and only eight of the sixteen participating banks left with an allocation. The other eight, despite bidding, received nothing.
A Week Unaccounted For
The auction that cleared on Tuesday was supposed to happen on June 9. That morning, the NBE cancelled it without warning, citing only “unforeseen technical issues” and promising a revised schedule “later,” along with an apology to participants. No further explanation followed, then or since. When the auction finally ran a week later, it did so without a hitch: bids were submitted, results were announced, and settlement was completed on the same single-day timeline the bank uses for every routine round. The smooth execution raises an obvious question that the NBE has left unanswered, namely, what actually broke on June 9 and why it took exactly seven days to fix. For an institution that has made a rules-based, electronically submitted auction system the centerpiece of its foreign exchange reform programme, a week-long outage with no public accounting is the kind of opacity that banks, importers, and exporters end up pricing in as risk, whether or not the underlying fault was ever serious.
An Allocation Built for Half the Room
The bigger story sits in the numbers themselves. Demand outstripped supply by more than two to one, and of the sixteen banks that bid, only eight secured any foreign currency at all. The other half presumably had genuine import or remittance obligations to cover and walked away to either wait for the next round or seek dollars elsewhere. This is not a one-off result. Ethiopia’s foreign currency market has continued to run a structural deficit since the 2024 float, with import demand for fertiliser, pharmaceuticals, and capital goods consistently outpacing the supply generated by exports, remittances, and financial inflows. Inflation has been climbing alongside that pressure, with the annual rate reaching 13.4 percent in May, up from 11.7 percent in April. An auction that turns away half its bidders, even one that resumed after a disruption, is a fairly direct illustration of how far the supply side still has to travel.
Twenty-Six Birr in Fourteen Months
Tuesday’s rate also extends a depreciation trend that has not let up since the float began. The table below tracks the published rate from each NBE foreign exchange auction, regular and special, since April 2025.
| Date | Auction | Weighted Avg. Rate (Birr/USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 1, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 3 | 131.7095 |
| Apr 17, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 4 | 131.4961 |
| May 7, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 5 | 132.9643 |
| May 22, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 6 | 133.1715 |
| Jun 5, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 7 | 134.9519 |
| Jun 19, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 8 | 136.6286 |
| Aug 5, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 9 | 138.2555 |
| Oct 14, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 10 | 148.1007 |
| Dec 2, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 11 | 154.3993 |
| Dec 16, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 12 | 154.7747 |
| Dec 27, 2025 | Regular Auction No. 13 | 154.4773 |
| Jan 6, 2026 | Regular Auction No. 14 | 154.8792 |
| Feb 21, 2026 | Special Auction | 153.2503 |
| Jun 16, 2026 | Special Auction No. 23 | 158.0000 |
National Bank of Ethiopia auction results
The birr has weakened from roughly 131.71 to 158.00 against the dollar in just over 14 months, a depreciation of nearly 20 percent. The pace has not been linear. Rates were largely flat through the second half of 2025 and into January 2026, before this latest round pushed the clearing rate to a fresh high. Worth noting too is how tightly Tuesday’s auction clustered: the marginal and weighted average rates differed by less than one hundredth of a birr, and the entire band of accepted bids spanned just one birr cent. That kind of compression suggests bidding behaviour has become highly uniform around whatever rate the market expects the central bank to clear at, which is its own signal about how participants are reading the central bank’s reaction function.
Auction at a Glance
| Amount offered | USD 100 million |
| Total bids received | USD 236.3 million (2.36x oversubscribed) |
| Marginal (cut-off) rate | 157.9999 birr/USD |
| Weighted average rate | 158.0000 birr/USD |
| Highest accepted bid | 158.0000 birr/USD |
| Lowest accepted bid | 157.9900 birr/USD |
| Banks that participated | 16 |
| Banks that received an allocation | 8 |
A Compressed Calendar Ahead
The timing leaves the NBE little room to absorb another disruption. Under the USD 200 million fourth-quarter allocation programme announced on May 27, the bank had pencilled in two USD 100 million special auctions spaced fifteen days apart, on June 9 and June 24. The cancellation has compressed that gap to just eight days between Tuesday’s resumption and the next scheduled round. The central bank has said the next auction will proceed “in line with the previously announced schedule,” which suggests June 24 will proceed as planned. Whether last week’s outage was a genuine one-off or an early sign of strain in the CSD-based bidding system will become clearer fast. A second smooth auction inside of two weeks would put the episode behind the bank. Another disruption would turn a one-line technical notice into a pattern that the market, already absorbing a softer birr and faster inflation, has little patience left to forgive.