Actual Budget for Multi-Currency: Does It Really Work? (2026)

Actual Budget has a devoted following, and it earns it. It's free, open-source, local-first, and genuinely fast. If you care about owning your own financial data and never handing it to a third party, few apps come close.

So when people who live across currencies find it, they ask the obvious question: can Actual Budget handle euros and dollars in the same place? If you earn in one currency and spend in another, does it convert, or does it just show two piles of numbers that don't add up?

The short answer, as of mid-2026, is that Actual does not do multi-currency. That's not a criticism dug out of user forums, it's what the project's own documentation says: Actual "is currency agnostic and does not support multi-currency."² There's an experimental currency feature in development, but it isn't a shipped, reliable capability yet. Here's the full picture, and who Actual is still a great fit for.

What Actual Budget is (and why people love it)

Actual describes itself as "a local-first personal finance tool" that is "100% free and open-source."¹ Your data lives on your own device by default and syncs between devices in the background, with optional end-to-end encryption so the sync server can't read it. If privacy and data ownership are the reasons you distrust mainstream budgeting apps, this is the appeal.

It didn't start out free. Actual was a paid, closed-source product that its creator, James Long, ran as a business before opening it up and making it 100% free in 2022.⁹ Today it's maintained by a community of contributors rather than a company, which shapes a lot of what follows: features arrive when someone volunteers to build them, not on a roadmap tied to revenue.

The budgeting method itself is solid: envelope-style, every-dollar budgeting with a clean interface, rules, schedules, and reports. For a single-currency user who wants a free, private alternative to YNAB, it's one of the best options available.

The multi-currency reality

Actual's own documentation is refreshingly direct about this. The multi-currency page states plainly that "The Actual Budget software is currency agnostic and does not support multi-currency," and adds that "People are working on implementing currency support, but it will take time."²

"Currency agnostic" is worth unpacking, because it sounds more capable than it is. It means Actual treats every amount as a plain number and doesn't attach a currency to it or convert between currencies. Its display settings run to a single number format, a date format, and your first day of the week,⁴ not a per-currency system. So you can type "1000" whether that's dollars or euros, but Actual has no idea which, and it will never turn EUR 1,000 into its dollar equivalent.

In day-to-day terms, that means:

• No automatic exchange rate conversion. If you keep a euro account and a dollar account, Actual won't reconcile them into a single figure. A report that spans both is just adding raw numbers of different currencies together, which isn't meaningful.
• No unified budget across currencies. You can't have one "Groceries" category that includes euro spending in Lisbon and dollar spending in Chicago, converted and combined.
• No exchange rate impact tracking. Because Actual doesn't know a transaction is in a foreign currency, it can't tell you whether your spending rose because you bought more or because the rate moved.

The workaround the docs describe is manual: build rule templates to approximate conversions yourself. There's no built-in rate feed doing it for you.²

What about the experimental currency feature?

Contributors are actively working on currency support. The 25.11.0 release, from November 2025, added an experimental feature to "expand the currencies available and where they are displayed," including currency display in rules and schedules.³ That's real progress, and if you self-host and like living on the edge, it's worth watching.

But two caveats matter. First, it's flagged as experimental, and Actual is explicit that "we may decide to remove the feature in a future release."² Building your financial system on a feature the maintainers reserve the right to pull is a real risk. Second, adding a currency label and display is not the same as automatic, transparent conversion between currencies with historical rates, which is the part that actually makes multi-currency budgeting work. As of mid-2026, that part isn't here.

Bank connections: harder than it looks for expats

Even setting currency aside, connecting non-US banks to Actual takes effort. Bank sync is optional and only works if you run your own instance of actual-server, and even then Actual doesn't sync automatically, you trigger it.⁵ The available providers are Enable Banking (European banks), SimpleFIN Bridge (North American banks), Akahu (New Zealand), and Pluggy.ai (Brazil).⁵

There's a catch that hits Europe-based users specifically. GoCardless, which was long the go-to Open Banking provider for European accounts in Actual, stopped accepting new sign-ups. The docs note that "From July 2025 onwards, GoCardless has stopped accepting new Bank Account Data accounts," so existing users keep working but new ones can't onboard through it.⁶ Enable Banking is the current European route.

The North American connection also carries a small cost: SimpleFIN Bridge is a paid subscription, "$1.50 / mo, or $15 / year," and you have to subscribe before you can add your first account.⁷ Modest, but it means "free" comes with an asterisk once you want automated bank data.

The "free" question, honestly

Actual is free to self-host: you can run the server from the command line, use the provided Docker containers, or build from source.⁸ If you're comfortable with a terminal, it genuinely costs nothing.

If you're not, the docs recommend paying a small amount for managed hosting through PikaPods or Fly.io.⁸ That's a fair trade, but it changes the picture: for a non-technical expat, "free and open-source" really means "free if you run your own server, or a few dollars a month if someone else runs it for you," plus the bank-sync subscription. None of this is expensive. It's just more setup than downloading an app and logging in.

Who Actual Budget is great for

• Single-currency users who value privacy. If you live and spend in one currency and want a free, local-first, you-own-the-data alternative to subscription apps, Actual is excellent.
• Technical users who like to tinker. Self-hosting, rules, an open API, and an active community make it a great fit if setup and maintenance are part of the fun for you.
• People escaping a specific app. If you left Mint, YNAB, or a bank's built-in tool and mostly want clean envelope budgeting without a subscription, Actual delivers.

Who should look elsewhere

Actual probably isn't the right tool if:

• You earn in one currency and spend in another, and you want them in a single, converted view.
• You want automatic exchange rates and the ability to see how rate changes affect your budget over time.
• You have bank accounts in more than one country and don't want to self-host a server to connect them.
• You'd rather not build your finances on a feature the maintainers describe as experimental and potentially removable.

None of this makes Actual a bad app. It's a very good single-currency budgeting tool that is honest about what it doesn't do. Multi-currency just isn't part of it yet, and "yet" has been the answer for a while.

An app built around multiple currencies

Multi-currency isn't a plugin or a setting in Borderless Budget, it's the foundation. It connects to banks in the US, Europe, and other countries, keeps every transaction in its original currency, and converts everything to the home currency you choose using daily exchange rates, so your euro and dollar spending land in the same budget categories. It also separates real spending changes from exchange rate movement, the thing Actual can't see because it doesn't track currency at all.

If you want the free, self-hosted, privacy-first path and only deal with one currency, Actual is a great choice. If your daily life runs across currencies, our guide to multi-currency budgeting walks through the approaches that actually work, and it's worth trying a tool built for it from the start.

Related reading:

• YNAB for Expats: Does It Work? (2026 Review)
• MoneyWiz vs Spendee: Multi-Currency Budgeting Showdown (2026)
• Copilot Money App Review: Good for Expats? (2026)
• The Complete Guide to Multi-Currency Budgeting