SBP buys $10.8bn from domestic FX market in 17 months

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) purchased $10.76 billion from domestic foreign exchange (FX) markets between June 2024 and October 2025, as per the latest data released by the central bank.

The central bank reports foreign exchange market interventions with a lag of three months.

“Net FX intervention is defined as outright and swap purchases of foreign exchange minus outright and swap sales of foreign exchange by the SBP from/to banks in the interbank foreign exchange market,” says SBP.

A monthly breakdown of SBP data suggested that it bought the greenback worth $573 million in June 2024, followed by $722 million in July, $569 million in August, $946 million in September, $1.03 billion in October, $1.15 billion in November, $536 million in December, $154 million in January 2025, $223 million in February, $860 million in March and $473 million in April 2025.

The central bank purchased $522 million in May 2025, $502 million in June, $189 million in July, $257 million in August 2025, $1.02 billion in September 2025, and $1.03 billion in October 2025.

Amid these interventions and other inflows and outflows, the SBP’s FX reserves saw mixed movement during the period, according to data released by Arif Habib Limited (AHL).

Accordingly, the foreign exchange reserves were boosted by $280 million to $9.39 billion in June 2024, but reduced by $169 million to $9.22 billion in July 2024.

The reserves rose by $216 million to $9.44 billion in August 2024, followed by a sharp surge of $1.3 billion to $10.74 billion in September 2024. October 2024 saw reserves bolstered by $466 million to $11.2 billion, while reserves increased by $835 million to $12.03 billion in November 2024, but declined by $306 million to $11.73 billion in December 2024.

The FX reserves further reduced by $313 million to $11.4 billion in January 2025, and decreased by $169 million to $11.25 billion in February 2025. It saw a significant decline of $611 million in March 2025 to $10.64 billion, followed by a $364 million decrease to $10.28 billion in April 2025.

The reserves increased by $1.24 billion in May 2025 to $11.5 billion, gained further $2.99 billion in June 2025 to $14.5 billion, but declined by $182 million in July 2025 to $14.3 billion, reduced marginally by $5 million in August 2025, $145 million in September to $14.2 billion, but was up $328 million in October 2025 to $14.5 billion.

Currently, the SBP reserves are standing at $16.09 billion as of January 16, 2026.

Analysts say that these interventions have played a key role in building the country’s FX reserves during the period and helped with the country’s repayments.