10 Most Expensive Global Remittance Corridors
PlainRemit ranks the most expensive global money-transfer corridors by the World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide latest-quarter average send cost as a percentage of the transferred amount, rendered server-side from the corridors table.
Research period:
Research question
Among the 322 tracked sender → receiver country pairs in the World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide dataset, which corridors carry the highest average send-cost percentage in the latest measured quarter, and what does the concentration of high-cost corridors in sub-Saharan and inter-African flows tell us about market structure?
Methodology
This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.
Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.
Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.
Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.
Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.
Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.
See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.
10 Most Expensive Global Remittance Corridors
Live data: reflects the current dataset
The ranked top 10
Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.
| # | From | To | Avg cost (%) | Cheapest cost (%) | Providers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tanzania | Uganda | 63.6% | 7.5% | 6 |
| 2 | Tanzania | Kenya | 58.2% | 8.2% | 7 |
| 3 | Tanzania | Rwanda | 44.3% | 6.0% | 5 |
| 4 | South Africa | Malawi | 43.4% | 14.5% | 13 |
| 5 | Turkey | Bulgaria | 41.6% | 12.5% | 5 |
| 6 | Senegal | Mali | 25.7% | 1.5% | 5 |
| 7 | South Africa | China | 23.2% | 16.6% | 5 |
| 8 | Saudi Arabia | Syria | 22.1% | 22.1% | 1 |
| 9 | Nigeria | Togo | 21.4% | 21.4% | 1 |
| 10 | Italy | Serbia | 15.3% | 2.9% | 7 |
Source: World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Remittance Prices Worldwide quarterly cost dataset. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Remittance Prices Worldwide quarterly cost dataset. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is Tanzania, with a value of 63.6% on the Avg cost (%) column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record (63.6%) and the 10th-ranked record (15.3%) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, specifically the Remittance Prices Worldwide quarterly cost dataset. PlainRemit ingests the source vintage published by the agency and keeps this page current, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published dataset is reflected here within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the steps applied to prepare the data.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
Cost figures are the simple average across all providers operating the corridor in the World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) most recent measured quarter and are expressed as a percentage of a standardized USD 200 send amount unless otherwise noted by the source methodology. RPW measures the total cost including transfer fee plus exchange-rate margin. The 'cheapest cost' column is the lowest single-provider total cost in the same quarter. Many sub-Saharan and inter-African corridors carry high costs because of limited provider competition, lower transfer volumes, and currency conversion through US dollar or European hub currencies, not because of regulatory choice in either endpoint. Corridor coverage is limited to country pairs that the World Bank actively measures; many small-volume flows are not tracked and would not appear. Costs change quarter to quarter as providers enter and exit corridors and as exchange-rate margins move. The figure reflects intermediary costs and does not include in-country last-mile fees the receiver may pay to access funds.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 corridors by avg-to-cheapest cost spread (worst provider-shopping opportunity)
Sources
- World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) quarterly dataset - https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/
- World Bank KNOMAD, Migration and Remittances Data - https://www.knomad.org/data/remittances