How the US Dollar's Value Changed In Relation to the Filipino Peso While Building Our House

During the time we have been buying land and building our house here in the rural Philippines, the foreign exchange (FOREX) rate between the US Dollar (USD) and Filipino Peso (PHP) changed about 15% in our favor. That made buying the land and paying for the house to be built cheaper by around $25K USD. Which is awesome.

As I write this, the exchange rate is about 1USD to 57.3PHP. It tends to jump around, but it has been in the 55-60PHP/USD range for most of the last few years. This means in January, 2022, $100USD would have gotten one roughly 5230PHP. In January, 2026, it would have gotten one about 5900PHP.

Here is a graph I made of data I was able to pull on the subject broken down monthly.

The lowest point, at the beginning of 2022, was when we bought our first plot of land. The highest point has been in the latter half of 2025. So, the exchange rate has been gradually drifting up in favor of the Filipino Peso—meaning, you can buy more pesos with each dollar. It is far outside the scope of this blog post to attempt to explain why this exchange rate has moved in this fashion. But, let’s say these are interesting times we live in and there are many things happening around the world right now.

This is great if you have US Dollars and are converting to Filipino Pesos to buy land or build a house. It’s not so great if you have PHP and need USD. A Filipino citizen who wants to visit the US or any other country that uses the USD recently would be spending more Pesos to get fewer dollars.

At the same time, whatever savings we experienced from FOREX rates was largely offset if not negated by inflation. The cost of labor, building materials, and most government fees have all gone up considerably over the past four+ years.

In a future blog post, I will do a breakdown of how much everything cost to build the house. I already did a break down of how much the land cost.

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Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash