The refund exchange rate decides what a foreign sale really costs you, and Apple and Google don't set it the same way

Apple and Google both take your foreign-currency refunds back out of your proceeds, but they don't agree on which day's exchange rate to use. That refund exchange rate is why a refund on a euro, yen or rupee sale can cost you a few cents more, or a few cents less, than the sale paid you in the first place. On one refund it's noise. Across a year of international refunds it's a line on your books that nobody budgeted for, and it's easy to misread as a reporting error.

Which refund exchange rate each store uses

The two stores run different models. Apple keeps your earnings in each storefront's currency for the whole fiscal month and converts once, when it pays you. Google converts every order to your payout currency at the moment the order is placed. A refund inherits whichever model its store runs.

Apple converts at payment time

Apple's Payments and Financial Reports page states that its bank converts payment amounts into the currency of your bank account. The rate is set by Apple's bank, and Apple says it's typically the spot rate on the date of payment and no more than three business days before the money reaches your account. Payment itself comes within 45 days of the last day of the fiscal month the transaction was completed in.

So until Apple pays, your proceeds sit in local currencies. A sale in Germany is euros in your report. A sale in Japan is yen. Apple's financial report even names the currency on every line in a field called Partner Share Currency.

Google converts at order time

Google's Play Console help says it uses the exchange rate at the time the order is placed to convert a sale from the buyer's currency into your account currency. That rate updates throughout the day, and each order receipt shows the rate used. Payouts then go out in the currency of your payments profile.

Why a refund can take back more than the sale paid you

On the App Store, the gap comes from the calendar. Apple's financial reports are based on transactions processed and settled during each Apple fiscal month, and a report is generated whenever there are purchases or refunds in that period. A refund that settles in a later month shows up there as a Return line, with Sale or Return set to R, in the same local currency as the sale. It's then converted along with everything else in that later month, at that later payment's rate.

If the storefront currency strengthened against your bank currency between the two payments, the refund takes back more than the sale delivered. If it weakened, the refund takes back less. Neither store pays you for the difference or charges you a fee for it. It's simply two conversions on two different days.

What about Google Play refunds

Google's help page makes two promises. For orders placed in the buyer's local currency, refunds go back in the same currency, and changes in exchange rates won't affect the refund amount. And any debits to your payments profile for chargebacks use the exchange rate from the time the order was placed. That second sentence locks a chargeback to the original rate.

For ordinary refunds, the page doesn't spell out which rate converts the debit on your side. You don't have to guess, though. Google's monthly earnings report gives every line, including Charge refund and Google fee refund lines, its own Currency Conversion Rate, defined as the rate used when converting buyer amounts to payout amounts in your merchant currency. Compare the rate on a refund line with the rate on its original Charge line and you'll see what happened.

What it costs in money

Here's a worked illustration with made-up numbers, to show the mechanics rather than any real rate. Say your Partner Share on an App Store sale in a euro storefront is €7.00, and your bank account is in US dollars.

The euro side nets to zero, exactly as it should. The dollar side doesn't, because the refund was converted on a day the euro was worth more. Swap the two rates and you'd come out $0.28 ahead instead. On a single sale that's trivial. On thousands of refunds concentrated in a few currencies during a big currency move, it adds up to real money, and it's money that shows up nowhere as a line called exchange loss.

The costs no rate ever reverses

The currency swing is the small part. The large part is what you spent delivering the sale before it was refunded, and none of it comes back in any currency.

• Compute: the GPU or server time behind every image, video or model response the buyer already received.
• API calls: third-party requests billed to you the moment they fired, often invoiced in dollars no matter where the buyer lives.
• Storage: files the buyer created, still sitting on your bill after the refund.
• Payouts: revenue shares already sent to creators, affiliates or partners on that sale.

That's why the two refund flows that ask you for evidence matter more than any exchange rate. Apple's CONSUMPTION_REQUEST gives you 12 hours to send consumption information, and Google Play's chargeback review through orders.reviewrefund gives you 24 hours. Every other refund, from Google's 48-hour self-service window to support refunds and voided purchases, is decided without you.

Chargebacks in foreign currency on Google Play

From August 3, 2026, Google Play and developers share chargeback costs for orders placed after that date. The developer covers the purchase price less Play's service fee, plus the chargeback fees charged by the financial institution. Google keeps covering its own service fee.

The exchange rate part is predictable. Because Google uses the order-time rate for chargeback debits, the price portion of a lost chargeback costs you the same amount in your payout currency that the sale originally earned. The bank fee is the part that isn't tied to the sale. Google's earnings report notes that chargeback amounts appear in the following month's earnings billing cycle, and that chargeback fees display as an aggregated monthly total after disputes are resolved.

Why your refund numbers don't match across reports

If your refund totals look different depending on where you read them, currency is a common reason. Apple's Sales and Trends estimates USD amounts using a rolling average of the previous month's exchange rates. Payments and Financial Reports use the actual rate at payment, shown only once that month's payment has been disbursed. Apple says plainly that refunds, billing retries and currency conversions may be recorded at different times in each system, and tells developers not to compare the two totals directly.

A quick reconciliation routine

• Reconcile App Store refunds in the storefront currency first, using Partner Share Currency, before converting anything.
• Convert at the rate on the payment that actually carried the refund, not the rate of the original sale.
• On Google Play, match each Charge refund line to its original Charge line and compare their Currency Conversion Rate values.
• Track chargebacks separately from refunds, since Google bills them in the following month's cycle and adds bank fees as a monthly total.
• Keep per-transaction usage records, so a refund you can contest is contested inside the 12-hour or 24-hour window, whatever currency it's in.