Maybe not for every Mauritian… but for a lot of us, yes.
If you've watched the rupee lose value against the US dollar over the years, it's not unreasonable to consider keeping some of your savings in USD instead… And if you already get paid in dollars, invest abroad, or regularly need USD, then having a proper account that can hold the money is even more useful.
Opening the account and converting some rupees is only the first step though. The real questions are: what will the account cost you, and what are you actually going to do with the dollars once they’re sitting there?
Why keep some of your savings in USD?
Let's start here because it's a familiar conversation in Mauritius… The rupee keeps losing value against the US dollar. In 2001, Rs 29.13 could get you one US dollar. By 2024, you needed about Rs 46.41 to get yourself a single US dollar. So, over those 24 years, the rupee lost roughly 43% of its value against the dollar… Let’s have a look at the chart below.
How many Mauritian rupees bought 1 USD?
You can see that the MUR has been on a historical decline (we need more and more rupees for one dollar). So it's not hard to see the appeal of keeping some of your savings in USD instead of keeping everything in MUR… Another thing is that (to this day) the US dollar remains the world's dominant currency. When it comes down to investments, business, loans, and foreign exchange reserves… the USD is at the forefront of conversations.
So, if the rupee continues to lose value against the dollar over the years, converting some of your MUR to USD to mitigate that loss of value? Pa si kouyon ki sa.
Converting MUR to USD isn't free
This one is easy to miss because your bank almost never shows a line that says "currency conversion fee"… Instead, you'll normally see different buying and selling rates.
When you're buying USD from the bank, you pay the higher selling rate. If you later sell those dollars back, you get the lower buying rate… Basically, the bank sells you USD for more than it'll buy those same dollars back from you. This difference is called the spread (we explain exactly how spreads work in a different article)
The point is that repeatedly going: MUR to USD to MUR back to USD can get expensive because you're crossing that spread again and again… So if you already know that you'll often need USD, keeping a steady USD stash can save you from unnecessarily converting the same money back and forth.
Your FCY account has its own costs too
Once you've opened the USD account, there will most likely be costs on the banking side. Depending on your bank, you might have service fees, transfer fees or charges related to how much money you keep in the account.
This is where the minimums can get confusing. Banks usually talk about three different ones::
minimum opening deposit (how much you need to deposit to open the account in the first place)
minimum balance (how much you need to keep in the account after it's open)
minimum balance to earn interest (how much you need to keep in the account before the bank starts paying you interest)
These matter… especially if you're planning to invest some of your USD. It’s worth checking how much needs to stay behind in the USD account and if dropping below that minimum balance means that you lose interest, pay a fee or something else.
Is it worth opening an account just to hold USD?
It can be. If your goal is simply to keep some of your savings outside MUR, a foreign currency account does give you somewhere to do that. The thing to watch out for is whether the cost of keeping the account makes sense for the amount of USD that you're holding.
Take MCB as a real example… Its USD foreign currency account currently (as of september 2026) costs $11.50 every six months. That’s $23 a year. If you're keeping $1,000, that first year's fee alone is 2.3%. If you have $10,000 in the account, it's just 0.23%. See… same account, same fee, but very different impact.
Ultimately there’s nothing wrong with converting some MUR and simply holding the USD. Given the long-term depreciation of the rupee against the dollar, there can be a perfectly reasonable argument for doing that. You just have to run the numbers first… The smaller your USD stash, the more those fixed account fees can matter.
Your USD can also do something while you hold it
This is where things get more interesting. Even though we just established that converting MUR to USD and holding onto it isn’t a bad idea… it also doesn’t mean that it’s the best idea either. When comparing the USD to rupees, it looks pretty solid. But USD has its own inflation too… This means that $10,000 today won't have the same purchasing power as $10,000 ten years from now. It's one of the reasons why saving alone guarantees long-term loss.
So instead of leaving all of your USD as cash, you could keep some accessible in the account, put some into a USD fixed deposit or invest some of it. If the money is invested, its value can grow or fall independently of what's happening between USD and MUR, so that's a different decision with its own risks… And you don't necessarily have to pick only one. Having a USD account doesn't mean that all of your USD has to sit in it doing the same thing.
What if you're a Mauritian living abroad?
This one’s a bit different…
If you already manage some of your money overseas, the question isn't really whether a foreign currency account can be useful. It's more about whether there's any benefit to keeping that foreign currency in Mauritius.
Maybe you want to keep money in Mauritius without converting it to MUR. Maybe you regularly send money back, receive money there or want to keep part of your savings in the country (in a currency that you already use). Those are actual reasons for having the account.
But if a Mauritian foreign currency account doesn't make anything easier for you, it could simply mean another account, another set of fees and another thing to manage.
Pou résumé
Is a foreign-currency account worth it? It really depends on what you need the account to do. As long as it has a clear purpose and the costs don’t eat more than the benefit you’re getting, it can make sense.