Skip to the research
Hourly · Measured

Average Hourly Range, Pair by Pair

Daily range answers how far a market travels; hourly range answers whether a plan has room to work inside the hour it trades. GBP/USD averages 18.2 pips an hour across the full day — but 30.8 in its best hour and 10 in its worst.
18.2GBP/USD mean hour (pips)
30.8its best hour
10its worst hour
3.1×between them
How this was measured. Computed from 1,898,746 one-minute GBPUSD candles covering 2021-01-03 to 2026-04-30 — 1,595 trading days. Range means high minus low over the stated period, grouped by real clock time in UTC rather than by bar count, so an hour is an hour even across a weekend. Figures are in pips. The underlying numbers are published as JSON at https://fxabsolute.com/stats/GBPUSD.json.

Nine pairs

PairMean hourPeak hourAt (UTC)TroughRatio
GBP/JPY29.944.514:00–15:00 UTC18.62.4×
EUR/JPY23.334.214:00–15:00 UTC14.32.4×
USD/JPY21.733.613:00–14:00 UTC11.92.8×
GBP/USD18.230.814:00–15:00 UTC103.1×
USD/CAD1528.414:00–15:00 UTC83.6×
EUR/USD1424.514:00–15:00 UTC6.93.6×
AUD/USD12.620.314:00–15:00 UTC7.62.7×
AUD/CAD12.819.814:00–15:00 UTC9.52.1×
EUR/GBP8.713.714:00–15:00 UTC4.33.2×

The ratio column is the useful one. Every pair moves between two and three times as far in its best hour as its worst, so an "average hourly range" quoted as a single number describes almost none of the day accurately.

Why the mean hour misleads

Twenty-four hours averaged together includes the 10-pip hours nobody trades. A strategy running only in the London and New York hours is working with roughly 25.3 pips an hour, not 18.2 — and one running overnight has considerably less than the mean suggests.

FXAbsolute free backtester

Test the finding on the chart—not just on the page

Open FXAbsolute and replay USD/CAD candle by candle. Turn the observation into explicit entry, stop, target and exit rules, then measure the result yourself.

Free in the browser · no download · no credit card · no sign-in required to start

Questions

What is the average hourly range of GBP/USD?

18.2 pips averaged across all 24 hours, but that conceals the shape: 30.8 pips in the 14:00–15:00 UTC hour against 10 in the quietest.

Which pair moves most per hour?

Of those measured, GBP/JPY at its peak hour — 44.5 pips in the 14:00–15:00 UTC window.

Why is the average hourly range misleading?

Because it averages the hours nobody trades in with the hours everybody does. Every pair measured moves two to three times as far in its best hour as its worst.