Rankings · World Bank RPW
Remittance corridor rankings
Every tracked corridor, sorted three ways, cheapest, most expensive, and largest by volume, so you can find the best route and the biggest savings.
- 377
- Corridors tracked
- 7.3%
- Average cost
- 0.3%
- Cheapest on record
Cheapest Corridors
The most affordable corridors to send money internationally, sorted by average transfer cost.
Most Expensive Corridors
High-cost corridors where senders pay the most. Understand why some corridors have elevated fees.
Largest Volume Corridors
The world's busiest remittance corridors by annual transfer volume in USD billions.
Biggest Movers
Corridors whose cost changed the most since the prior World Bank release, computed release-over-release.
Global Overview
Sending Countries: Volume vs. Cost
The 30 largest sending countries by annual WDI remittance outflow, plotted against their average outbound cost. Market size only weakly predicts cost (r=-0.23) - some of the largest-volume sending countries remain among the pricier origins, while smaller markets can be cheaper.
Sending countries by volume and cost: United States, $107.1B annual outflow, 5.53% average cost. Saudi Arabia, $58.69B annual outflow, 6.09% average cost. Switzerland, $42.68B annual outflow, 6.94% average cost. Germany, $26.67B annual outflow, 4.96% average cost. France, $20.8B annual outflow, 7.31% average cost. Kuwait, $16.74B annual outflow, 3.54% average cost. Australia, $15.86B annual outflow, 7.38% average cost. Canada, $15.11B annual outflow, 5.77% average cost. South Korea, $14.31B annual outflow, 5.49% average cost. Italy, $13.91B annual outflow, 8.04% average cost. United Kingdom, $13.17B annual outflow, 5.08% average cost. India, $12.08B annual outflow, 6.32% average cost. Qatar, $12.06B annual outflow, 6.02% average cost. Belgium, $11.22B annual outflow, 3.13% average cost. Austria, $10.81B annual outflow, 4.57% average cost. Thailand, $9.98B annual outflow, 11.87% average cost. Russia, $8.86B annual outflow, 3.03% average cost. Japan, $7.17B annual outflow, 10.69% average cost. Norway, $6.29B annual outflow, 3.66% average cost. Czech Republic, $5.96B annual outflow, 6.27% average cost. Poland, $5.6B annual outflow, 3.73% average cost. Sweden, $4.2B annual outflow, 6.65% average cost. Brazil, $1.86B annual outflow, 12.62% average cost. Israel, $1.62B annual outflow, 13.13% average cost. Ghana, $1.31B annual outflow, 13.29% average cost. Dominican Republic, $1.17B annual outflow, 7.68% average cost. New Zealand, $1.14B annual outflow, 8.39% average cost. South Africa, $1.13B annual outflow, 16.9% average cost. Spain, $0.79B annual outflow, 5.65% average cost. Chile, $0.69B annual outflow, 4.93% average cost.
Top Cheapest Corridors
Methodology
All rankings use the most recent quarterly data from the Source: World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) Database. Costs are expressed as a percentage of a $200 transfer amount, including both service fees and exchange-rate margins, the two components that determine what a sender actually loses on a transfer. This standardization makes services comparable across corridors and providers regardless of currency pair.
Corridors are ranked by the "cheapest" metric (the lowest cost observed in the published survey for that corridor-quarter) and by the "average" metric (the mean across RPW-tracked providers). PlainRemit does not publish a bilateral volume ranking because its WDI inputs are national, not corridor-level, totals.
The Source: UN Sustainable Development Goal 10.c target is to reduce remittance costs to under 3% by 2030 and eliminate corridors above 5%. The World Bank reported global average is approximately 6.4%, meaning many senders still pay well above the target rate. Rankings are refreshed after each quarterly RPW release.
How to read the three rankings
The cost rankings answer different descriptive questions: where the recorded survey cost is lowest, where it is highest, and how the observations are distributed. They do not identify a live best-buy service or imply why a provider's price moved.
All rankings share one important caveat: they aggregate tracked providers in the published survey quarter. The lowest observed quote can differ from the corridor average. Open a corridor page to inspect the recorded quarter, provider count, and historical trend, then verify a current quote directly before sending money.
For policy analysts and journalists, the rankings update on the same quarterly cadence as the underlying World Bank panel. Movement at the top of the cheapest list typically signals new fintech entry or aggressive promotional pricing; movement at the top of the most-expensive list typically signals exchange-rate stress, regulatory change, or provider exit on a thin corridor. Movement at the top of the largest-flows list is rare and tends to track macroeconomic shifts (oil prices for Gulf-to-South-Asia flows, US labor demand for US-to-Latin-America flows).
Download the corridor cost extract cited on this page: remittance-corridor-costs.csv (World Bank RPW · CC0).
Every figure on PlainRemit is rendered directly from World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) data, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.