What affects the cost of sending money abroad

Payment method

The median total cost of sending USD 200 was 4.04% when paying by credit card, 2.93% by debit card, 2.93% by bank account transfer and 4.15% in cash. These are medians over every service the World Bank recorded, in all corridors with data.

Total is the fee plus the exchange-rate margin. Margin is the exchange-rate margin and Fee is the total minus the margin; each is the median of the group. The Vs bank column is the median, over corridors that have both methods, of the difference between the method’s median cost and the bank transfer median. It removes the effect of which corridors a method appears in. Groups with fewer than 3 such corridors show a dash.

Where the transfer starts

Services started online had a median total cost of 3.13%. Services started with an agent had 3.58%.

Bank or money transfer operator

The 151 bank services had a median total cost of 6.00%. The 1020 money transfer operator services had 3.21%.

How much you send

Costs are shown as a share of the amount, so a fixed fee weighs more on a small transfer. For the same service, the median difference between the cost at USD 200 and at USD 500 was +1.08 percentage points. The cost was lower at USD 500 than at USD 200 in 1011 of 1176 services that have both figures.

Exchange-rate margin and fee

For services whose total cost for USD 200 was above 0.3%, the exchange-rate margin was a median 31% of the total cost (1149 services). The rest is the upfront fee. A transfer advertised as having no fee can still be expensive if the margin is large.

How to read these figures

They are medians over all 1184 services the survey recorded on 48 corridors, including the few providers the corridor pages leave out. A provider with several services counts once per service, and services are not weighted by how many people use them.

Corridors differ in which methods and channels exist, so the median of a group partly reflects which corridors it appears in. The comparison with bank transfers in the same corridor, in the first table, limits this.

20 services have a negative total cost for USD 200. For those, the exchange-rate margin was negative by more than the fee, meaning the exchange rate offered was better than the reference rate the survey used.

The figures are survey measurements, not live prices. Check the provider’s own quote before you send.

Source: The World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, available at remittanceprices.worldbank.org. Data: Q3 2025 release, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Adapted by Kitwagon: providers are sorted by cost, and the cost shown for “Your amount” is Kitwagon’s own estimate calculated from the World Bank figures.