The Margin
The distance between the official rate and the street, measured across twenty-two years.
Two prices for the same dollar on the same day. The distance between them is the subject of this file.
Method
The parallel rate is documented for 3,811 days of the series — 3,793 observed in the daily record and 18 taken from the Central Bank's own published Baghdad market-rate table — and derived by linear interpolation between observations for the remaining 4,429 days. 3,793 + 18 + 4,429 = 8,240. Interpolated segments are drawn dashed and lighter throughout the site, and any statistic computed over a period states the interpolated share.
Premium is computed as (parallel − official) ÷ official. Where the Central Bank published no official rate for a date, no premium is computed; the day is omitted rather than filled.
The 2018–2019 window is the weakest part of the parallel series: contemporary market quotations for that period have not yet been recovered from a primary source, and the interpolation across it spans a long interval. Statistics that fall inside it should be read as indicative, and this file does not use them in any headline figure.
Baseline official rate in force since February 2023: 1,310 IQD per US dollar.