The Rupiah vs the Ringgit, Baht and Peso: How Indonesia's Currency Has Done Against Its Neighbours
5 min read
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5 min read
Say you bought US$1,000 at the end of 2025. It cost you about Rp16.67 million. On 5 October 2026, the same US$1,000 costs about Rp17.94 million. That is Rp1.27 million more, for the same dollars.
Is the rupiah just unlucky? Or is every currency in the region going through the same thing? This post compares the rupiah vs ringgit, baht and peso so you can see.
First, a plain definition. An exchange rate is the price of one currency in another. "USD/IDR 17,940" means one US dollar costs Rp17,940. When that number goes up, the rupiah is weaker: you need more rupiah to buy a dollar.
Different news sites use different dates and start points, which makes numbers hard to compare. So we use one table with one date. It is from the Asian Development Bank's Daily Market Watch for 2 September 2026. The change is measured from 1 January 2026. A minus sign means the currency lost value against the US dollar.
| Currency | Per US dollar (2 Sep 2026) | Change since 1 Jan 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Indonesian rupiah (IDR) | 17,715 | -5.87% |
| Philippine peso (PHP) | 62.21 | -5.47% |
| Thai baht (THB) | 33.27 | -5.31% |
| Malaysian ringgit (MYR) | 4.04 | +0.47% |
Source: ADB Daily Market Watch, 2 September 2026, as shown in search results. We could not open the PDF itself.
The picture is clear. The rupiah, peso and baht all lost around 5% to 6%. The ringgit did not. It ended slightly higher.
The gap between the three weak currencies is small. The rupiah is last, but only just. The real split is between the ringgit and everyone else.
Mostly, with small differences. A Reuters-style table dated 4 September 2026, reported by Interaksyon, showed the rupiah down about 5.4%, the peso down about 5.7%, the baht down about 4.4% and the ringgit up about 0.35%.
Same story, slightly different digits. That is normal. Tables are taken at different hours, and some use a different closing rate for the end of 2025. So read these numbers as "about 5% to 6%", not as exact scores.
Katadata reported a deeper rupiah fall of 7.72% in August. The difference comes from how the change is measured. We explain that next.
Look at the rupiah on 5 October 2026. Per a market report from Journalarta, USD/IDR was Rp17,940. The end-2025 level was Rp16,670.
There are two ways to do the sum:
Both are correct. They answer different questions. The ADB table uses the second way (value of the currency), so a minus sign means a weaker currency.
When you read a headline, check which one it uses. This is the number one reason two articles about the same currency disagree. These two calculations are our own arithmetic from the quoted rates.
By early October the rupiah had slipped further from the 2 September level in the table. We have no matching October figures for the other three, so the table above stays our fair comparison.
Several things were pushing at once. Each of these comes from Trading Economics' running commentary on the rupiah, seen in search results:
BI did respond. It raised its policy rate by a total of 100 basis points (1 percentage point) in three moves since May, to 5.75%, and held it there in September. It also raised the incentive for FX swap hedging to 25% to attract foreign money. For how BI steps into the market, see how Bank Indonesia's FX intervention works.
We cannot say for sure. The sources we found did not explain Malaysia's case, so we will not invent a reason.
What we can say is that the three weaker currencies had at least some trouble in common: a strong dollar, higher energy costs and nervous investors. The ringgit shows that these pressures do not hit every country the same way. It is a reminder that a currency also reflects its own country's finances, not just the dollar.
Not always. A weaker rupiah hurts people who import things, travel abroad, pay for school overseas or owe dollar debt. It helps exporters, who earn dollars and spend rupiah.
For an investor it can go both ways. If you own US stocks, their value in rupiah goes up when the rupiah falls. We cover that in why a weaker rupiah can help your US stocks (Indonesian). If you hold only rupiah, your money buys fewer dollar-priced things.
One more tool is the real effective exchange rate, which compares a currency against many trading partners and adjusts for inflation. It is a fairer test than one dollar rate. Read our guide to the real effective exchange rate of the rupiah.
Do not take our word for the current numbers. Open the NetWort macro page and find the USD/IDR card. Look at where the line was at the start of the year and where it is today. Then compare that percentage with the table above. That tells you whether the rupiah is still behind its neighbours.