GBP/USD Historical Data Downloader
A desktop app that downloads Pound Sterling vs US Dollar (GBP/USD) price history on your own machine, written straight to your disk as CSV or JSON. Daily and monthly GBP/USD candles reach back to 1986-02-10 — around 40 years — while quote-level tick history begins 2003-05-04. A complete GBP/USD 1-minute series is roughly 8.5M rows, about 426 MB as CSV.
Or work out the size first: the file-size calculator takes a range and returns the row count and CSV size.
Windows, macOS, Linux · €9 one-time for the entry licence · get the app
What the app fetches for GBP/USD
| Symbol | GBP/USD |
|---|---|
| Instrument | Pound Sterling vs US Dollar |
| Asset class | Forex Majors |
| Tick & 1-second data from | 2003-05-04 |
| 1–30 minute candles from | 2003-05-04 |
| Hourly & 4-hour candles from | 2003-05-04 |
| Daily & monthly candles from | 1986-02-10 |
| Timeframes | Tick → 1s → 1m → 5m → 15m → 30m → 1h → 4h → Daily → Monthly |
| Price types | Bid & Ask (with volume) |
| File formats | CSV, JSON (MetaTrader, NinjaTrader, Parquet & SQLite/DuckDB from the Pro licence) |
| Coverage | 1986-02-10 → 2026-11-02 (last completed trading day) |
| Retrieval | Local — your machine connects directly to Dukascopy Bank SA |
| Runs on | Windows, macOS, Linux |
GBP/USD timeframes the app supports
- Tick (every quote)
- 1 second
- 1 minute
- 5 minutes
- 15 minutes
- 30 minutes
- 1 hour
- 4 hours
- Daily
- Monthly
GBP/USD coverage & file size, timeframe by timeframe
GBP/USD does not start at the same date at every granularity: daily candles begin 1986-02-10, but the tick archive only reaches 2003-05-04, roughly 17 years later. Each row below gives that timeframe's own start date and scale, current through 2026-11-02:
| Timeframe | History from | Approx. rows | Approx. CSV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tick (every quote) | 2003-05-04 | very large | — |
| 1 second | 2003-05-04 | very large | — |
| 1 minute | 2003-05-04 | ~8.5M | ~426 MB |
| 5 minutes | 2003-05-04 | ~1.7M | ~85 MB |
| 15 minutes | 2003-05-04 | ~568K | ~28 MB |
| 30 minutes | 2003-05-04 | ~284K | ~14 MB |
| 1 hour | 2003-05-04 | ~142K | ~7 MB |
| 4 hours | 2003-05-04 | ~35,500 | ~2 MB |
| Daily | 1986-02-10 | ~10,300 | ~513 KB |
| Monthly | 1986-02-10 | ~490 | ~24 KB |
Counts are approximate, derived from forex session hours across the available history. Tick and 1-second runs are queued and resumable rather than fetched in one pass. See the data methodology for how candles are built.
Working with the GBP/USD series
Two events dominate any modern GBP/USD study. The Brexit referendum on 24 June 2016 moved the pair further intraday than any session in its floating history, and the flash crash of 7 October 2016 took it several percent lower within minutes of the Asian open before partially recovering. Both are real, both survive in tick data, and both will be discarded as errors by a naive outlier filter — check what your cleaning step does to them before trusting the result.
GBP/USD intraday data — ticks, minutes and the nights cable gaps
GBP/USD tick and 1-minute historical data
Ticks and 1-minute candles both start 2003-05-04; the minute series is aggregated from the ticks, so the two always agree. The full 1-minute run is 8.5M rows, about 426 MB as CSV; 5-minute is 1.7M rows, about 85 MB as CSV. Ticks are a queued, resumable download rather than a single fetch. The long daily history that reaches back past 1992 is a separate story, told in the GBP/USD history guide.
Bid or ask? Why it matters more for GBP/USD than for most majors
The app exports either side of the quote. On a normal London afternoon the difference is a fraction of a pip and a bid-only backtest is fine. In cable's worst moments it is not: in the thin early-Asian trading of Monday 26 September 2022, after the UK "mini-budget" of 23 September, the pair printed its all-time low, and spreads in moves like that widen far beyond their usual size. A backtest run on bid prices alone assumes it could have bought at the bid in exactly those minutes. Download both sides for the event windows that matter, and model the fill from the ask.
GBP/USD CSV download — columns and timestamps
Candle files are timestamp,open,high,low,close,volume, five decimals, timestamps in UTC — so the UK clock change twice a year does not move a single row, and a strategy that trades "the London open" has to apply the shift itself (08:00 London is 07:00 UTC in summer and 08:00 UTC in winter). Hard-coding one UTC hour silently trades the wrong session for half of every year. The CSV format guide has the full layout.
Is GBP/USD historical data free?
The app is a free download and the data comes straight from Dukascopy Bank SA to your disk, never through our servers. Every licence, including the €9 entry tier, reaches the whole GBP/USD archive at every timeframe — tiers differ by software features, never by history.
What's inside the GBP/USD file
timestamp,open,high,low,close,volumeOne row per candle, stamped with the bar's opening time; tick files instead carry timestamp,askPrice,bidPrice,askVolume,bidVolume on every quote — ask first. Timestamps are epoch milliseconds in UTC, which pd.to_datetime(df.timestamp, unit="ms", utc=True) or =A2/86400000+DATE(1970,1,1) turns into a date. Worked examples and import steps are in the CSV & JSON format guide.
About Pound Sterling vs US Dollar
Pound Sterling vs US Dollar (GBP/USD) is a spot forex pair with 40 years of retrievable history. It is commonly used for backtesting forex trading strategies and expert advisors (EAs), spread and volatility analysis, training algorithmic and machine-learning models, and charting currency-pair history. Pick any date range from 1986-02-10 onward, choose a timeframe and the bid or ask side, and the app fetches and writes the files locally — no scripting.
Frequently asked questions
- How far back does GBP/USD data go?
- GBP/USD daily and monthly candles reach back to 1986-02-10 — roughly 40 years. Tick and intraday history is shorter: it begins 2003-05-04. Both run up to the last completed trading day, and every licence tier reaches all of it.
- Why does GBP/USD tick data start later than its daily candles?
- Because they come from different parts of the archive. Daily and monthly GBP/USD candles are reconstructed from long-run end-of-day records going back to 1986-02-10, while the tick archive — every individual bid/ask quote — only begins 2003-05-04, about 17 years later. If your study needs the full 40-year span, work in daily candles; if it needs quote-level detail, 2003-05-04 is the earliest GBP/USD start date available.
- How large is a full GBP/USD download?
- The complete GBP/USD 1-minute history is roughly 8.5M rows, about 426 MB as CSV. Daily candles over the same instrument are far smaller — around 10,300 rows, 513 KB. Tick and 1-second runs are larger again and are queued and resumable rather than fetched in one pass. Sizes are approximate; nothing is priced by volume.
- What columns are in the GBP/USD CSV file?
- OHLC files contain a timestamp plus open, high, low and close columns (with volume); tick files contain a timestamp with bid and ask prices. All timestamps are UTC. The files import directly into Excel, Google Sheets, Python (pandas read_csv), R, MetaTrader, NinjaTrader and TradingView.
- Do you sell GBP/USD data?
- No — we sell software. The MarketData Hub client retrieves Pound Sterling vs US Dollar (GBP/USD) on your own machine, under your instruction, directly from the source; we never host, cache or relay it. Your use of the retrieved data is subject to the source's terms.
Guides
- Get the app — Windows, macOS, Linux
- How to download historical forex data
- CSV & JSON format — columns explained
- Tick data vs OHLC candles
- Backtesting with historical data
- EUR/USD history
- GBP/USD (cable) history
- Import into MetaTrader
- Load in Python (pandas)
- How far back data goes
- vs HistData
- vs TrueFX
- Best free data sources
Related Forex Majors
- AUD/USD — Australian Dollar vs US Dollar
- EUR/USD — Euro vs US Dollar
- NZD/USD — New Zealand Dollar vs US Dollar
- USD/CAD — US Dollar vs Canadian Dollar
- USD/CHF — US Dollar vs Swiss Franc
- USD/JPY — US Dollar vs Japanese Yen
Preview your GBP/USD download — pick a range, see the exact file →
Sizing it up rather than fetching it? Estimate GBP/USD rows and CSV size for any date range.
The preview runs in the browser; the download runs in the free desktop app, on your machine.