Data study · World Bank RPW · 2012Q3 to 2025Q3
Have remittances actually got cheaper?
The World Bank publishes remittance prices every quarter, but each release is a separate snapshot. We tracked the same corridors from one end of the record to the other to find out what really changed.
- 5.1%
- Typical corridor today (2025Q3)
- -3.7pp
- Since 2012Q3
- 204
- Corridors measured end to end
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The finding
The typical remittance corridor costs 5.08% of the amount sent, down from 8.75% in 2012Q3 - a 3.67pp fall measured on the same 204 corridors throughout. The average tells a different story: it bottomed at 6.59% in 2022Q2 and has since risen to 7.06%. Both are correct. The typical corridor kept getting cheaper while a small number of corridors became extraordinarily expensive, and those few drag the average up on their own.
- 5.08%
- median corridor cost, 2025Q3
- 7.06%
- mean corridor cost, 2025Q3
- 21
- of 204 corridors at or under the UN 3% target
- 109
- still above 5%, down from 180
Median vs mean corridor cost
| Checkpoint | Median | Mean | At or under 3% | Above 5% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012Q3 | 8.75% | 9.39% | 5 | 180 |
| 2016Q1 | 7.11% | 7.89% | 3 | 166 |
| 2019Q1 | 6.77% | 7.30% | 7 | 151 |
| 2022Q2 | 5.70% | 6.59% | 14 | 118 |
| 2025Q3 | 5.08% | 7.06% | 21 | 109 |
How we calculated this
Source: the World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide database, 17,184 corridor-quarter observations spanning 2011Q1 to 2025Q3. RPW measures the total cost of sending $200 along a specific country-to-country route, including fees and the exchange-rate margin, averaged across the providers it surveys.
We take the 204 corridors observed in both 2012Q3 and 2025Q3 and report that fixed set at every checkpoint, so the series reflects price rather than which routes happened to be surveyed. Checkpoints are drawn from releases that exist; the panel is irregular, so they are not evenly spaced in time. The median is the middle corridor of the panel, taken as the average of the two central values where the count is even. We report it beside the mean rather than instead of it, because the gap between them is itself the finding.
The UN Sustainable Development Goal target 10.c asks countries to reduce remittance costs to less than 3% and to eliminate corridors costing more than 5%. We count corridors against both thresholds directly rather than restating a headline figure.
Source: World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) Database (2012-2025) Remittance Prices Worldwide quarterly cost releases
Download the corridor cost CSV (CC BY 4.0 derived snapshot of the same RPW panel this study uses).
Every figure on PlainRemit is rendered directly from World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) data, no number is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.