Average Daily Range (ADR) by Currency Pair - Measured, Not Estimated

What the average daily range tells you

The daily range is simply the distance between a day's high and its low. Averaged over months, it answers three questions a trader asks constantly: is my stop loss wide enough to survive a normal day, is my target close enough to be reached inside one, and is this market moving enough right now to be worth trading at all.

It is a measurement, not a forecast. A pair with a 60-pip average will still produce 20-pip days and 200-pip days - which is why the table below shows the median and the widest day alongside the average, rather than one number pretending to be the whole story.

Window: 2026-01-11 to 2026-09-17 · Recalculated: 2026-09-20 06:51 UTC · measured on the OANDA feed our charting desk runs on

Why the median matters more than the average

The average is dragged upward by a handful of violent days - a central bank surprise, a jobs number nobody expected. The median is the middle day, and it is closer to what you will actually meet on a normal Tuesday. When the two are far apart, that market's character is quiet most days, wild occasionally, and a stop sized on the average will sit far too wide on the majority of days.

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Which hour does each market actually move?

A market that averages 60 pips a day does not deliver them evenly. The table below is the average range of each hour of the day, in UTC, with weekends excluded. The pattern it shows is the same one the session pages describe - but as measurement rather than assertion.

Average range of each hour, weekends excluded. The busiest hour for each instrument is in bold. Currency pairs in pips, gold in dollars, indices in points.

Does the day of the week change anything?

Slightly, and less than folklore claims. The weekday split is in the table above for each instrument. Mondays are often a little quieter while the week finds its footing, and Fridays fade into the close - but the differences are usually small next to the day-to-day variation, and no sensible plan is built on them alone.

How to use these numbers

• Sizing a stop. If your stop is a small fraction of the median daily range, normal noise will take you out before your idea is wrong. ATR does the same job bar by bar.
• Sanity-checking a target. A target further than one average day away needs either a multi-day hold or an unusually strong move. Neither is impossible; both should be deliberate.
• Choosing when to sit at the desk. If a pair does most of its travelling in three hours, the other twenty-one are mostly spread and patience. See the best time to trade.
• Comparing instruments honestly. Compare the percentage column, not the pip column - 500 points on an index and 60 pips on a currency are not comparable units.

Method, and whose prices these are

The feed is OANDA's, read through the same charting desk we trade and teach on. We are not a data vendor and we do not pretend to publish our own prices: we publish measurements taken on a named, ordinary retail feed. On the hourly timeframes those bars are merged with the history this desk has stored, which does not change whose prices they are.

That is worth one paragraph, because it is the honest part. Spot forex has no central exchange and no consolidated tape, so there is no single true daily range. Every broker's daily bar has its own cut-off and its own high and low, and two feeds can differ by a few pips on the same day. An average daily range is therefore always "on this feed" - which is why we name ours, print the window and describe the cut. A number quoted with none of those three cannot be checked by anybody, including the person who published it.

Daily figures are the mean and median of (high − low) on completed daily bars over the window printed above the table. The newest bar is excluded while it is still forming. Hourly figures are the mean range of each UTC hour from completed hourly bars, with weekend hours excluded - the daily bar opens at the New York close, so the Sunday evening hours that belong to Monday's session are counted as Monday.

Currency pairs are quoted in pips (0.0001, or 0.01 for yen pairs); indices in points; metals and oil in dollars, because a gold range quoted in cents reads as nonsense. Nothing is smoothed, modelled or gap-filled: a bar we do not have is a bar we do not count. Any instrument without enough settled data is left out of the table rather than estimated.

These figures describe the past. They are not a prediction of tomorrow's range, and nothing here is financial advice.