Across the world's large economies, ten currencies have risen more than 11 percent against the U.S. dollar in the last year. The top of the list is a Middle Eastern shekel; the bottom of the list, in the G10 universe, is a Norwegian krone. In between sits a map of what a weaker dollar looks like in practice.
Across the world's large economies, ten currencies have risen more than 11 percent against the U.S. dollar in the last year. The top of the list is a Middle Eastern shekel; the bottom of the list, in the G10 universe, is a Norwegian krone. In between sits a map of what a weaker dollar looks like in practice.
Trading Economics' April 6 table ranks the large-economy currencies that have gained the most against the U.S. dollar in the last year. The universe is countries with annual GDP of $250 billion or more; the measure is year-over-year spot performance.
Ten currencies cleared the double-digit line. Only three of them belong to countries the market routinely classifies as "safe-haven" in the G10 sense. The rest are emerging-market, frontier, or commodity exporters whose FX histories are not usually told as stories of dollar weakness.
The first four currencies — shekel, Colombian peso, South African rand, Mexican peso — share a common backdrop but arrive at the top by different routes.
Israel's story is resilience despite conflict. Colombia and Mexico's is rate differentials: domestic policy rates that sat well above the Fed's through 2025, drawing carry-trade inflows that the dollar could not compete for. South Africa's is a commodity and fiscal cycle turning at the same moment capital was looking for somewhere that was not the U.S.
The rand and the peso each posted 16.4 percent gains — the same number, from different places.
South Africa's is cyclical. Platinum, gold, and coal prices rose together in late 2025; load-shedding eased; the current account narrowed. Mexico's is structural. Nearshoring investment continued running at record pace, the Banxico-Fed rate gap stayed wide, and a tourism sector that started 2024 at pre-pandemic levels is now running well above them.
Two very different economies, the same bar height. The common factor sits in Washington.
Below the top tier sits a middle band that is, in its own way, more illustrative. Australia, Brazil, and Nigeria — a developed-market commodity exporter, an emerging-market commodity exporter, and a frontier one — all cleared the 13 percent line against the dollar.
The Australian dollar's 14.8 percent gain is its best twelve-month print since 2011. The Brazilian real's 14.5 is its largest since the 2016 reset. The Nigerian naira's 13.5, measured against a dollar that has itself been weakening, is the first sustained appreciation since the 2023 FX reforms allowed the naira to float.
The Nigerian naira's 13.5 percent appreciation belongs in a different conversation. For most of the 2010s and early 2020s the naira's official rate was managed by the central bank, often well above the parallel-market rate. Reforms in mid-2023 moved the currency closer to a single, market-determined exchange rate.
What looks like "appreciation against the dollar" in the naira's 2026 print is partly that reform maturing — inflation moderating, reserves rebuilding, the parallel-market premium compressing — and partly the same dollar weakness everyone else is catching.
Norway, Kazakhstan, and Malaysia round out the ten. The krone, tenge, and ringgit cleared the 11 percent line on the same set of themes the middle of the table played out: rate differentials, commodity prices, and a dollar that stopped doing the work it usually does in a stronger-for-longer cycle.
None of these three currencies typically feature in "biggest mover of the year" lists. Their presence here is, itself, the story.
Read from the other side of every pair, the ranking is not ten stories about ten currencies. It is one story about the U.S. dollar.
The DXY index is down roughly 9 percent year-over-year. Analysts cite three drivers: a Federal Reserve that delivered more cuts in 2025 than the market had priced into late 2024; an administration whose trade and tariff posture has been more volatile than currency markets typically tolerate; and a growing share of reserve managers rebalancing at the margin out of dollars and into a mix of gold and other currencies.
None of those three forces is dramatic on its own. Compounded over a year, they produce a ranking in which shekels, pesos, and rand sit above Japanese yen and euros.
A weaker dollar redistributes purchasing power across borders in ways that are not symmetric.
For American exporters, it is a tailwind: U.S. goods become cheaper abroad. For manufacturers in appreciating-currency countries, it is the opposite. For U.S. investors holding foreign equities or bonds, a weaker dollar adds a return on top of the local one — a 16 percent currency move is a 16 percent tailwind on any dollar-unhedged foreign position. For emerging-market issuers with dollar-denominated debt, the effect is even more direct: the debt is cheaper to service in local-currency terms, sometimes meaningfully so.
The ranking is a league table of currencies. It is also, viewed from any single country on it, a tax or a subsidy — depending on which side of the ledger the reader sits.
Year-over-year FX prints are noisy. One-month moves are noisier. The reason a ten-currency ranking like this one carries information is that it measures a single counterparty — the dollar — against ten independent currencies simultaneously.
When a scattered group of economies, with uncorrelated domestic stories, all gain double digits against the same currency in the same window, the signal is about the common currency, not the ten disparate ones. The 2026 ranking says something about Israel and Colombia and Australia. It says more about the dollar.
Spot-currency performance is drawn from Trading Economics, measured as the year-over-year change in each currency's value against the U.S. dollar as of April 6, 2026. The universe is restricted to countries with annual GDP of $250 billion or more, using IMF 2025 nominal GDP estimates.
Context on the Bank of Israel's attribution of shekel strength, Banxico and the Banco de la República's rate paths, Nigeria's 2023 FX reforms, and the DXY dollar index is drawn from contemporaneous central-bank commentary and market data. The analysis of capital flows and reserve-manager behaviour draws on IMF COFER data through Q4 2025.
This is an editorial framing of a published ranking. Figures are reproduced as cited; the argument about what the ranking implies is the author's.