Ranking · World Bank RPW · 2025Q3
Most expensive remittance corridors
Where sending money costs the most, ranked by average price on a $200 transfer, and where switching providers saves the most.
- 118.2%
- Priciest · Turkey→Bulgaria
- 75
- Corridors above 8%
- 105pp
- Top avg-to-cheapest gap
The verdict
The priciest corridor we track is Turkey → Bulgaria at 118.2% - but even here the cheapest provider charges 13.2%, a 105-point gap that rewards anyone who shops around - the #100 cutoff to make this list is 7.1%.
- 7.1%
- #100 cutoff to make this list
- 14.3%
- average cost across this top-100
- 7.5
- avg. providers surveyed per corridor
According to the World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide database, these rankings draw on 17,184 quarterly corridor price observations spanning 2011Q1 to 2025Q3, each measured as the cost of sending $200 along a specific country-to-country route. The World Bank panel is irregular (semi-annual in the early 2010s, and no 2025Q2 release), so this is a count of observations, not of consecutive quarters.
Why Are Some Corridors So Expensive?
High costs are driven by limited competition, low digital infrastructure in receiving countries, regulatory barriers, and small transaction volumes making corridors uneconomical for fintechs. Sub-Saharan Africa and Pacific Island corridors are often the most expensive globally.
Why these corridors stay expensive
Every corridor near the top of this ranking sits there for at least one of four structural reasons: thin provider competition, currency illiquidity, cash-out-only payout networks, or low corridor volume relative to fixed compliance costs. The four typically overlap. When a corridor's annual volume is well under USD 500 million, fintechs cannot amortize the AML/KYC and correspondent-banking setup over enough transactions to undercut incumbent banks, so the only senders' options are bank wires and money-transfer-operator branch transfers, both of which carry margins of 8–15%.
Several geographic clusters dominate the high-cost list. Intra-African corridors (e.g., South Africa to Botswana, Tanzania to Rwanda) carry costs above 9% on average because cross-border settlement still relies on USD-denominated correspondent banking even within the same continent. Pacific Island corridors (Australia to Tonga, New Zealand to Samoa) are expensive because small populations mean every transfer carries proportionally high per-transaction overhead. Sub-Saharan-into-Sub-Saharan flows are especially elevated because central-bank currency controls add friction.
The cost gap between the average and the cheapest provider on these corridors is also telling. On low-cost corridors, the cheapest provider sits 1–2 percentage points below the average, a small dispersion that confirms competitive equilibrium. On high-cost corridors, the cheapest provider often sits 4–7 points below the average, indicating one or two outlier providers (typically digital-first fintechs) are winning the corridor by a large margin but most senders haven't switched.
Sender takeaway: if your corridor appears on this page, the marginal benefit of comparison shopping is substantial. A USD 200 transfer at the average corridor rate of 10% costs USD 20; the same transfer via the cheapest tracked provider at, say, 4% costs USD 8. Across 12 transfers per year, that's USD 144 retained, often a meaningful fraction of a recipient household's monthly budget.
Download the corridor cost extract cited on this page: remittance-corridor-costs.csv (World Bank RPW · CC0).
About this ranking
This ranking sorts every corridor surveyed in the 2025Q3 World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) release by average cost, the mean of every quote captured for that sender-receiver pair, expressed as a percentage of a standardized $200 transfer.
100 corridors are ranked here. The UN SDG 10.c target is a cost of 3% or less by 2030; the World Bank's own reported global average sits around 6.4%.
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.