USD/JPY is the US dollar priced in Japanese yen, a major pair where one pip is 0.01, so a session that spans 1.00 from low to high is a 100-pip range. The figures on this page are measured from Dukascopy hourly bid candles on a monthly schedule, with the window and the as-of date attached to every table, because an average daily range (ADR) quoted without either is not usable for sizing a stop or a grid step. Nothing here is a forecast, and most retail traders lose money trading forex however carefully they measure volatility: treat the numbers as a planning input, not an edge.
Quick Answer: USD/JPY’s average daily range was 145.8 pips over the 20 sessions ending September 30, 2026 and 103.7 pips over the last 250 sessions, with a 250-session median of 86.4 pips, measured from Dukascopy hourly bid candles. That ranks it 7 of 28 pairs in our 28-pair ADR table, about 1.72x EUR/USD’s range over the same window. The widest UTC hour was 13:00 UTC (27.6 pips), the widest session London (71.2 pips, 71% of the day), and the busiest weekday Thursday (120.6 pips).
| Measure | Pips | Window |
|---|---|---|
| ADR 20 sessions | 145.8 | last 20 qualifying sessions to September 30, 2026 |
| ADR 60 sessions | 116.1 | last 60 qualifying sessions |
| ADR 250 sessions | 103.7 | last 250 qualifying sessions (about one year) |
| Median, 250 sessions | 86.4 | same 250 sessions |
| September 2026 average | 145.4 | all qualifying sessions in that calendar month |
| ADR 20 ÷ ADR 250 | 1.41 | under 0.70 = compressed, over 1.40 = expanded, relative to its own year |
| Rank by ADR 250 | 7 of 28 | 1 = widest pair in the 28-pair table |
USD/JPY average daily range by month
| Month | Avg daily range (pips) | vs 250-session ADR |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 2025 | 116.7 | +13% |
| Nov 2025 | 100.5 | -3% |
| Dec 2025 | 101.5 | -2% |
| Jan 2026 | 122.7 | +18% |
| Feb 2026 | 123.8 | +19% |
| Mar 2026 | 112.4 | +8% |
| Apr 2026 | 98.4 | -5% |
| May 2026 | 78.9 | -24% |
| Jun 2026 | 54.8 | -47% |
| Jul 2026 | 105.5 | +2% |
| Aug 2026 | 91.9 | -11% |
| Sep 2026 | 145.4 | +40% |
USD/JPY range by trading session
| Session | UTC window (Apr–Sep / Oct–Mar) | Mean pips | Median pips | Share of the day's range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full day | 00:00–23:59 | 103.7 | – | 100% |
| Tokyo | 00:00-08:59 | 66.6 | 54.4 | 68% |
| London (widest) | 07:00-15:59 / 08:00-16:59 | 71.2 | 59.5 | 71% |
| New York (quietest) | 12:00-20:59 / 13:00-21:59 | 63.8 | 54.6 | 65% |
| London/NY overlap | 12:00-15:59 / 13:00-16:59 | 52.4 | 44.2 | 54% |
USD/JPY range by day of the week
| Weekday | Mean pips | Median pips | Sessions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 96.5 | 85.1 | 50 |
| Tuesday (calmest) | 93.8 | 82.5 | 51 |
| Wednesday | 102.0 | 92.6 | 51 |
| Thursday (busiest) | 120.6 | 94.0 | 48 |
| Friday | 106.7 | 84.6 | 50 |
USD/JPY range by hour of the day (UTC)
| UTC hour | Mean pips | Median pips | Share of the day's range |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00:00 | 25.6 | 22.5 | 25% |
| 01:00 | 21.8 | 18.6 | 21% |
| 02:00 | 17.4 | 15.1 | 17% |
| 03:00 | 15.7 | 12.7 | 15% |
| 04:00 | 16.7 | 13.6 | 16% |
| 05:00 | 16.8 | 14.9 | 16% |
| 06:00 | 21.4 | 17.6 | 21% |
| 07:00 | 23.8 | 19.8 | 23% |
| 08:00 | 23.7 | 19.8 | 23% |
| 09:00 | 20.1 | 15.9 | 19% |
| 10:00 | 16.9 | 13.9 | 16% |
| 11:00 | 17.3 | 14.3 | 17% |
| 12:00 | 24.0 | 19.1 | 23% |
| 13:00 (widest) | 27.6 | 22.3 | 27% |
| 14:00 | 25.6 | 23.0 | 25% |
| 15:00 | 24.3 | 22.2 | 23% |
| 16:00 | 18.4 | 16.7 | 18% |
| 17:00 | 16.9 | 13.3 | 16% |
| 18:00 | 16.8 | 12.9 | 16% |
| 19:00 | 15.6 | 11.5 | 15% |
| 20:00 | 13.3 | 10.2 | 13% |
| 21:00 (quietest) | 11.6 | 10.5 | 11% |
| 22:00 | 12.5 | 10.2 | 12% |
| 23:00 | 15.0 | 11.5 | 14% |
As of September 30, 2026. Source: Dukascopy hourly bid candles. All figures in pips (pip size 0.01 for USD/JPY). Daily sessions are UTC calendar days built from Dukascopy hourly bid candles (Dukascopy timestamps are GMT/UTC, so no timezone shift is applied). A day counts as a session only if it is a weekday carrying at least 12 hourly bars with tick volume and a non-zero high-low range, which excludes weekends, the Sunday-evening opening hours and near-closed holidays. The daily range is (high - low) divided by the pip size: 0.01 for JPY-quoted pairs, 0.0001 for the rest. ADR20, ADR60 and ADR250 are the means of the last 20, 60 and 250 such sessions; the median column is the median of the same 250 sessions. Session windows: Tokyo 00:00-08:59 UTC all year; London 07:00-15:59 UTC Apr–Sep and 08:00-16:59 Oct–Mar; New York 12:00-20:59 UTC Apr–Sep and 13:00-21:59 Oct–Mar; the overlap is their intersection. Sessions overlap in time, so their ranges do not add up to the full day. The 21:00 and 22:00 UTC hours contain the daily New York rollover, when spreads typically widen and bid candles register that widening as range. Past ranges describe what has already happened and are not a forecast of the next session.
Put the numbers to work: our free GridMaster EA takes grid spacing in pips as an input (
GridSizePips), and the ADR 20 figure above is the yardstick to size it against for USD/JPY. Download all 7 free MT4 & MT5 EAs →
Is USD/JPY compressed or expanded right now?
The most useful single number in the first table is the ratio of the 20-session ADR to the 250-session ADR, which for USD/JPY stands at 1.41 as of September 30, 2026. That reads as expanded: the pair is currently travelling well beyond its own one-year norm, so stops sized from the 250-session figure sit inside ordinary session noise, and a system that was stable on the annual number will report more stop-outs with no change to its logic.
The monthly column tells the same story at lower resolution. Over the last 12 calendar months the widest month for USD/JPY was September 2026 at 145.4 pips a day and the narrowest was June 2026 at 54.8 pips, against a 250-session average of 103.7. September 2026, the most recent complete month, averaged 145.4 pips, 40% above the one-year figure. We re-run this measurement after each month closes and the whole page updates from the new file, so if you are reading this some weeks after the as-of date, the compression reading is the one most likely to have moved.
The 250-session mean and median differ by 17.3 pips for USD/JPY. A mean that sits well above its median means a minority of outsized sessions is doing the work and the typical day is calmer than the average suggests; size stops from the median and reserve the mean for worst-case planning.
When USD/JPY moves: session and hour
USD/JPY’s widest session over the last 250 qualifying days was London, with a mean high-low range of 71.2 pips inside its own window, about 71% of the full day’s range. The quietest was New York at 63.8 pips (65% of the day), a 1.12x gap between the two. The London/New York overlap, the four hours both centres are open, carried 52.4 pips on its own, 54% of the day’s travel in 17% of its hours. Because the sessions overlap in clock time, their ranges share part of the day’s movement and do not sum to the full-day figure.
Hour by hour, the three widest UTC hours for USD/JPY were 13:00 UTC (27.6 pips), 00:00 UTC (25.6 pips), 14:00 UTC (25.6 pips), and the quietest was 21:00 UTC at 11.6 pips, so the busiest hour of the day ran 2.38x the quietest. The widest hour falls in the London/New York overlap, which is where most pairs in our table peak; USD/JPY follows the market-wide pattern rather than its own regional one. Note that the quietest hour sits in the 21:00-22:00 UTC rollover, when spreads widen and liquidity thins; a low range there is not an invitation to trade it cheaply.
Whether the busiest hours are the right hours is a strategy question, not a data one. Breakout and momentum rules want the range; mean-reversion and grid rules are usually better served by the sessions that produce rotation rather than travel, and a time filter that skips the widest hour is one of the cheaper risk controls available. The 28-pair hourly range table and session volatility table show where USD/JPY sits against every other pair on the same measurement.
Which day of the week moves most
Across the same 250 sessions, Thursday was USD/JPY’s busiest weekday at 120.6 pips of full-day range and Tuesday its calmest at 93.8 pips, a 1.29x ratio. That is a wide enough spread to matter if a rule sizes stops or grid spacing from a single daily average, because the same spacing is a different fraction of the day on Thursday than on Tuesday. The day-of-week table compares all 28 pairs on this measurement, and the one-year window is the honest caveat: five weekdays over 250 sessions is about 50 observations each, enough to rank them but not enough to call the ordering permanent.
Stop distance and grid spacing from USD/JPY’s range
Our guides express stop distance as a multiple of the measured 20-session ADR rather than as a fixed pip number, because a fixed number does not transfer between pairs or between regimes. A stop at half of ADR 20 sits inside ordinary session noise for USD/JPY; at one full ADR 20 it sits at the edge of a normal day’s travel; beyond one and a half it is paying for protection against a session the pair rarely produces. Use the 20-session figure, 145.8 pips as of September 30, 2026, not the 250-session one, because the stop has to survive the market you are in now. The risk management guide works through the position-sizing arithmetic that follows.
Grid systems consume the same number more directly: the rule-based grid blueprint derives spacing as ADR 20 divided by the number of levels you want a normal day to fill, floored at a multiple of the pair’s typical spread, and why grid EAs blow up treats spacing copied from another pair as one of the seven failure patterns. Put USD/JPY’s ADR 20 reading into the calculator below with the spread floor your broker actually charges on this pair. Wide-range pairs also carry wider spreads, so on a major like USD/JPY check the floor before the division.
Grid-spacing calculator
Enter an ATR value and multiplier above to calculate spacing.
Educational tool, not investment advice. Spacing and level counts here follow the rule-based grid blueprint; verify against your own broker's spread, margin requirements, and lot step before running a live grid.
Before sizing anything against real capital, run the rule on a demo for a few weeks of USD/JPY’s current regime. Open a free XM account to test it on a demo first; demo results are not live results, and past ranges are not a forecast of the next session.
How these figures are measured
Every number on this page comes from Dukascopy’s hourly bid candles for USD/JPY, downloaded per calendar month and aggregated locally with the same code that builds the 28-pair ADR table. A session is a UTC calendar day, 00:00 to 23:59, and only counts if it is a weekday carrying at least 12 hourly bars with tick volume and a non-zero high-low range, which removes Saturdays, the Sunday-evening opening stub and near-closed holidays. The daily range is the session high minus the session low divided by the pip size (0.01 for USD/JPY), with no true-range adjustment for overnight gaps, so these figures read slightly lower than an ATR(14) on the same data. If a month fails to download, the pair is omitted from that run and named under the hub table rather than estimated. Your platform’s daily bars will cut the day at its server time, not UTC, so expect its ADR to differ from these figures by a pip or two on a quiet pair and more on one that moves in the Asian session.
Related pairs and tables
Pairs sharing a currency with USD/JPY: AUD/JPY, AUD/USD, CAD/JPY, CHF/JPY, EUR/JPY, EUR/USD, GBP/JPY, GBP/USD, NZD/JPY, NZD/USD, USD/CAD, USD/CHF. The hand-written EUR/USD and USD/CAD guides cover ADR measurement methods in more depth, and best forex pairs for grid trading covers which of these pairs suit a grid at all, which is a separate question from how far apart the levels go.
All 28 pairs
- AUD/CAD average daily range in pips
- AUD/CHF average daily range in pips
- AUD/JPY average daily range in pips
- AUD/NZD average daily range in pips
- AUD/USD average daily range in pips
- CAD/CHF average daily range in pips
- CAD/JPY average daily range in pips
- CHF/JPY average daily range in pips
- EUR/AUD average daily range in pips
- EUR/CAD average daily range in pips
- EUR/CHF average daily range in pips
- EUR/GBP average daily range in pips
- EUR/JPY average daily range in pips
- EUR/NZD average daily range in pips
- EUR/USD average daily range in pips
- GBP/AUD average daily range in pips
- GBP/CAD average daily range in pips
- GBP/CHF average daily range in pips
- GBP/JPY average daily range in pips
- GBP/NZD average daily range in pips
- GBP/USD average daily range in pips
- NZD/CAD average daily range in pips
- NZD/CHF average daily range in pips
- NZD/JPY average daily range in pips
- NZD/USD average daily range in pips
- USD/CAD average daily range in pips
- USD/CHF average daily range in pips
- USD/JPY (this page)