Lebanon's Multiple Currency Rates Explained: A Complete Glossary
Lebanon's currency situation comes with its own vocabulary, and it's easy to mix up terms that sound similar but mean different things. Here's a quick-reference glossary.
BDL (Banque du Liban)
Lebanon's central bank, responsible for setting the official exchange rate and, since the 2019 crisis, for the Sayrafa platform.
Official rate
The central bank's formal reference rate. Historically fixed at 1,507.5 LBP per US dollar from 1997 until the 2019 crisis; still used today for certain formal, banking, and customs purposes. See our history of the peg and its collapse.
Sayrafa
Banque du Liban's electronic exchange platform, introduced after 2019 to provide a more market-reflective official rate for specific categories of transactions. Not the same as the everyday street rate — see our full Sayrafa explainer.
Sarafa / sarraf
The Arabic word for money changer, and the everyday term for the informal, street-level exchange rate — what this site tracks as the Market Rate.
Parallel rate / black-market rate
Other common names for the same thing as the sarafa/market rate — the free-floating rate actually used in day-to-day cash transactions, as opposed to any officially set rate.
Buy rate / sell rate
The two sides of any exchange quote. Buy is what you receive selling USD; sell is what you pay buying USD. See our buy vs. sell explainer for more detail.
Lollar
Informal term for US dollars held in Lebanese bank accounts that, due to informal capital controls since 2019, can't be freely withdrawn as physical dollars and are often only accessible at unfavorable bank-set rates — effectively a different, less valuable "dollar" than physical cash.
Dollarization
The widespread use of physical US dollars (rather than lira) for everyday pricing and transactions in Lebanon — a direct consequence of the lira's collapse. See our piece on dollarization for more.
Bookmark this page as a quick reference whenever a new term comes up in the news or in conversation.