How much your bank overcharges to send money home, country by country.
For a $1,000 transfer, we compare what a typical bank costs against the cheapest honest path we can find, whether that is a transfer app or the real stablecoin route. The bigger the gap, the bigger the rip-off. Ranked worst first.
Average bank overcharge
5.4 pts
Default to your bank instead of the cheapest route and you lose about 5.4 percentage points on a typical transfer, every time.
Cheapest-path average
1.1%
Destinations ranked
13
Migrants sent home about $905B in 2024, $685B of it to low- and middle-income countries. On every dollar of it, the channel a sender picks decides how much actually arrives.
14.99%
global average bank cost to send $200
6.36%
global average across every channel
4.59%
average digital transfer cost
3%
the UN Sustainable Development target by 2030
Source: The World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, available at http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org.
Three columns, one story
Every row compares the same corridor two ways. Read left to right: what a bank takes, what the cheapest honest route takes, and the gap between them that a sender keeps by switching.
Bank charges
The all-in cost of a typical retail bank transfer: the up-front fee plus the FX margin banks quietly bake into the exchange rate. The hidden margin is usually the larger half.
Cheapest path
The lowest honest all-in cost across every route we price, whether that is the best transfer app or the real stablecoin off-ramp. Stablecoin figures already carry every friction.
You save
The gap between the two, in percentage points. That is the rip-off: money a sender loses purely by defaulting to their bank instead of the best route for their corridor.
The full index
13 destinations, each priced at a $1,000 transfer. Across them, a typical bank averages 6.5% while the cheapest path averages 1.1%.
| Corridor | Bank charges | Cheapest path | World Bank avg | You save | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇻🇳USD Vietnam |
How each number is derived
The three columns above (bank charges, cheapest path, and the gap between them) are computed the same way for every corridor, so the ranking is strictly like-for-like. The one thing worth spelling out is how the stablecoin path is priced, because that is where most crypto comparisons cheat.
The stablecoin figure is a range, never a hero number. Anyone can quote a crypto transfer at under 1% by ignoring the buy spread, the cash-out fee, and the tax. We do not. When we say the cheapest path is the stablecoin one, that number already carries every friction, so it is believable. For some corridors the honest cheapest path is still your bank or Wise, and we say so.
Read the full honest cost modelCorridor figures draw on live provider data (Wise) and the real stablecoin off-ramp, grounded against the World Bank’s quarterly country-corridor cost benchmark where a corridor is covered. Benchmark source: The World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, available at http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org. See where our numbers come from.
This index is open data. Take no cut of any transfer, run no affiliate table, so the whole thing is yours to use: the full machine-readable dataset lives at /rip-off-index.json under a CC BY 4.0 license. Cite Parity and reuse it freely.