How We Update Rates: Frequency, Schedules, and Fallbacks

Last verified: May 16, 2026

This page documents exactly when and how we refresh each data category. If you look at a table at 7:00 AM and another at 9:00 AM, the timestamps may differ — this explains why.

See also: Methodology · Data sources · How we calculate scores.

Update schedule (summary)

Detail by category

Exchange rate — daily, ~6:00 AM GT time

Why that hour: Banguat publishes the reference rate for the business day between 5:30 and 6:00 AM. Our scraper runs shortly after to capture the day’s figure.

What is updated:

• Banguat USD/GTQ reference rate
• Banguat cross-rates for EUR, GBP, CAD, MXN, JPY
• Buy/sell rates from 8 commercial banks (scraped from tipodecambio.deguate.net)
• Pre-computed day/week/month deltas with trend labels (flat/up/down/better/worse)
• Appended to 400+ day historical archive

Weekend / holiday behavior: Banguat does not publish on Saturdays, Sundays, or official holidays. On those days the page shows the last published rate with the timestamp clearly visible (“Last updated: Friday May 15, 6:02 AM”). We do NOT fabricate a weekend “estimated” rate.

Interest rates — daily, ~8:45 AM GT time

Why that hour: Banguat tarifarios update during business morning. We run at 8:45 to capture the first stable set.

What is updated:

• Monetary policy rate
• Quetzal active average (~12.47% at time of publication)
• Quetzal passive average (~4.18%)
• Spread (~8.29%)
• USD averages
• Mortgage rates by bank
• Inflation tracking (when Banguat publishes monthly)

Note: Mortgage rates in tarifarios are the publicly advertised ones. The actual rate a client negotiates can be lower (better profile) or higher (aggressive LTV). We state this on every mortgage table.

Remittances — daily, ~8:38 AM GT time

Why that hour: The Wise comparison API stabilizes after 8:00 AM following the first spot prices of the day. We run at 8:38 to capture 5 send amounts ($100, $200, $300, $500, $1000) across 3 live providers (Wise, Remitly, Xoom) plus WU/MoneyGram estimates.

What is updated:

• Effective exchange rate per provider
• USD fee per provider per amount
• Total cost
• Amount received by recipient in GTQ
• Estimated delivery time
• Accepted payment methods
• Payout methods

WU/MoneyGram estimation: WU and MoneyGram do not publish programmatic rates. Their figures are calculated as: banguat_rate × (1 - known_public_margin) - public_fee. The margin is manually updated when WU/MG update their public fee schedules. Marked as estimate on the page.

Fallback: If the Wise API fails, we run scrape_remittances_fallback.py that pulses provider by provider with direct scraping. If EVERYTHING fails, we show the last snapshot with an orange banner “Data may be stale by up to X hours.”

Fuel — approximately weekly

Why irregular: MEM publishes a PDF when prices change — typically weekly but sometimes there are 10-14 day gaps if international crude prices stabilize. We have no control over MEM’s cadence.

What is updated:

• National regular, premium, diesel prices
• Per-department prices (where MEM reports)
• Variation vs previous publication

Departments without a report: Show as “no data” — NOT zero, NOT national average, NOT interpolation.

Banks — monthly manual audit

Why manual: Bank fee structures in Guatemala change infrequently (typically when a bank updates its quarterly or semi-annual tarifario). A daily scraper would be wasted. Instead, we manually audit the major banks the first week of every month.

What is updated:

• Account maintenance fee
• ATM fee (own / other / international)
• Incoming / outgoing wire fee
• Account opening requirements for foreigners
• ATM network coverage
• Mobile app quality (rating + features)

Government procedures — on demand

Why on demand: Procedures change when the institution decides to change them. There is no predictable schedule. We monitor tramites.gob.gt and ministry sites for changes and update the corresponding page when we detect one.

Additionally, readers report changes from reality (a procedure that costs differently at the teller window than what is published). Those reports are the fastest source — see how to report errors.

Fallback policy (when a source fails)

Our official sources are not always available. Banguat has had 4-12 hour outages, MEM has had days-long outages, commercial bank sites go down occasionally. Our policy:

1. Silent retry

If a source fails on the first attempt, we wait 5-10 minutes and retry up to 3 times. Most failures are intermittent and self-resolve.

2. Show cached data with warning

If after 3 retries the source remains unreachable, the page shows the last successful figure with:

• Visible timestamp of last update (e.g., “Last updated: May 15, 6:02 AM”)
• Orange banner indicating the source is temporarily unavailable
• Estimate of when we will try again (e.g., “Next attempt: in 4 hours”)

3. NEVER fabricate or interpolate

When a source fails we do NOT show:

• Estimated figures presented as real
• Averages from other days presented as today’s
• “Preliminary data” without a source

4. If failure persists > 48 hours

If a source has been down more than 48 hours, we put up a red banner and stop showing the figure (not just cached with orange warning — we hide it and show “No data available, see official source”).

Timestamps on every page

Every data page publishes a visible timestamp at the top, formatted as:

Last updated: May 16, 2026, 6:02 AM (GT time) · Next: tomorrow ~6:00 AM

If the timestamp is more than 24 hours old for daily data, the page is marked with a visual indicator and additional disclaimer.

Timezone

All timestamps are in Guatemala Standard Time (GMT-6), no daylight saving. Guatemala has not observed daylight saving time since 2006.

Who runs the scrapers

Scrapers run on GitHub Actions on a daily cron. Public logs available on request for audit.

Does a rate look stuck? Does a timestamp look off? Report to corrections@livinginguatemala.com — we correct within 24 hours for critical errors.