Methodology & Data Sources

Primary Data Sources

• World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW): The authoritative global database of remittance transfer costs. Collected using mystery shopping, actual quotes obtained from service providers for standardized $200 transfers. Published quarterly. Available at remittanceprices.worldbank.org.
• World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI): Annual national remittance inflow and outflow totals in USD. Used on country hubs for scale context. WDI totals are national, not bilateral, so they are not allocated onto individual corridor pages.

How Costs Are Measured

The World Bank RPW uses mystery shopping methodology: trained shoppers obtain actual quotes from service providers for a standardized $200 transfer from the sending country. Total cost includes two components:

• Service fee: The explicit fee charged by the provider
• Exchange rate margin: The difference between the mid-market exchange rate and the rate offered by the provider (their hidden markup)

Total cost is expressed as a percentage of the $200 amount. A 3% cost means $6 of a $200 transfer goes to fees and exchange rate margin, leaving $194 for the recipient.

Processing Pipeline

PlainRemit’s published database is built from World Bank RPW and WDI source releases. The currently published RPW vintage is 2025Q3; pages label that vintage as a historical benchmark rather than a live price. Our processing steps are:

• Preserves original mystery-shopping methodology, costs as percentage of $200 transfer
• Records the lowest surveyed provider cost per corridor and quarter; this is not a current provider recommendation
• Computes historical quarterly cost trends for each corridor
• Aggregates country-level inbound and outbound corridor costs and national WDI flow totals where available

We do not modify or interpolate World Bank figures. We do add clearly labelled explanatory analysis, which is kept separate from the source data.

Coverage

PlainRemit covers 377 country-to-country corridors across 138 countries from the published RPW release. Each corridor includes quarterly cost history going back to 2011 where the source surveyed it, national flow volume context (where available from WDI), and the lowest provider cost observed in the published RPW quarter. Coverage spans all major remittance-receiving regions including South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

Data Collection Method

The World Bank RPW data is collected through mystery shopping, trained researchers pose as customers and obtain actual transfer quotes from service providers in sending countries. This methodology captures the real cost a consumer would face, including both upfront fees and hidden exchange rate markups. The RPW surveys cover banks, money transfer operators (MTOs), post offices, and mobile money providers for each corridor. Surveys are conducted quarterly, providing a longitudinal record of how remittance costs change over time. This mystery shopping approach is considered the gold standard for remittance cost measurement because it reflects actual consumer pricing rather than advertised rates.

Update Schedule

The World Bank publishes updated RPW data quarterly and WDI remittance series annually. PlainRemit publishes the source vintage it has processed rather than calling historical data current. Between releases and processing updates, transfer costs may shift because of exchange rates, pricing changes, provider availability, payment method, and payout method. Always verify a live rate directly with a provider before sending money internationally.

Limitations

• Transfer costs change frequently, always verify current rates directly with service providers before sending.
• The RPW uses a $200 standard transfer amount. Costs for different transfer amounts may be proportionally different (some services have flat fees; others have percentage-based fees).
• WDI remittance totals are national; PlainRemit does not invent bilateral corridor volumes from them.
• Provider availability varies by corridor, cheapest available rates reflect only the providers surveyed by the World Bank.
• Cryptocurrency and informal transfer channels (hawala, hand-carried cash) are not included in the RPW survey.
• PlainRemit does not publish a global bank/MTO/fintech channel ranking from its provider table; firm-level averages are not the same statistic as RPW’s published channel tables.

Corpus placement

Entity pages lead with a computed corpus-relative placement so each corridor and country page states where that entity sits in the PlainRemit catalog, not only what the source record says about itself. Ordinals are deterministic SQL ROW_NUMBER() ranks over the live database:

• Corridors: latest_avg_cost ASC, slug ASC among corridors with a surveyed average cost, matching /rankings/cheapest (cheapest = #1). Percentile "cheaper than X%" language is complementary to this #N of M ordinal.
• Sending countries: World Bank WDI total_outflow DESC, slug ASC among senders with outflow > 0. /send-from browses alphabetically; this outflow ordinal is the analytical placement basis.
• Receiving countries: World Bank WDI total_inflow DESC, slug ASC among receivers with inflow > 0, matching the largest-receivers research ranking. /send-to browses alphabetically.

Placement text uses the ETS according-to pattern ("According to [source], [entity] ranks #N of M"). Ties break on slug so two equal values never share a rank. Bilateral corridor annual volumes are not ranked while those fields remain null in the published RPW join; WDI national flows stay on country pages only. Ranks are catalog-relative discovery aids, not transfer recommendations.

Editorial Workflow

Content on PlainRemit is compiled through an editorial process. Source data from World Bank RPW and WDI is loaded into the portal database; narrative framing, guide text, rankings commentary, and methodology writeups are published as analysis of that source data. We do not claim that a named specialist has reviewed every page. We do not accept payment for coverage, placement, or rankings, and the "cheapest" and "most expensive" lists are computed from the recorded World Bank survey data.

Not Affiliated

PlainRemit is not affiliated with the World Bank, any money transfer operator, or any government agency. This site is for informational purposes only and does not provide financial advice.

Data licensing and reuse (readiness)

PlainRemit does not sell data feeds or API keys today. The following assets are already published for citation and offline review, any commercial redistribution, embedding, or bulk extraction beyond the terms below requires operator approval.

• Remittance corridor cost CSV, remittance-corridor-costs.csv (also linked from /statistics). The underlying World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide public data is free to use; PlainRemit's own corridor comparisons and editorial copy remain PlainRemit's copyrighted work per the Terms, Acceptable Use clause: personal, journalistic, academic, and non-commercial research use with attribution is permitted, systematic scraping or bulk redistribution requires prior written permission.
• llms.txt discovery file, /llms.txt lists indexable surfaces for AI crawlers; no authenticated API.
• Per-page CiteThis blocks, copy-ready citations on the homepage, methodology, statistics, and every major page; not a programmatic export.
• Affiliate posture: no affiliate links exist today. PlainRemit exists to compare money-transfer costs honestly across operators, so any future affiliate unit would be barred from placement on or near a corridor/operator cost comparison it could bias (a direct conflict of interest for a comparison-shopping tool), clearly labelled, and never mixed with the computed cost figures.
• Alternative ad networks: not activated; AdSense is the current monetization path. Mediavine or similar requires sustained real traffic first.

Frequently Asked Questions