When you send money home you pay two things: the fee they show you, and the margin the provider builds into the exchange rate, which they almost never show. The World Bank measures both together and publishes the total average cost of sending money to each country. Here is the data.
What it costs to send money to each country
Total average cost (fee plus exchange rate margin) according to the World Bank. Change the amount to see how much you lose and how much arrives.
| Country | Average cost | You lose | Arrives |
|---|
Country by country: average cost and our guides
The same World Bank figures (latest year, 2023) as a plain table, sorted from cheapest to most expensive, with a link to our guide for each country where we have one. Costs are on a $500 transfer.
| Country | Average total cost | Cost on $500 | Arrives | Guide |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| El Salvador | 2.00% | $10.00 | $490.00 | Read the guide |
| Costa Rica | 2.26% | $11.30 | $488.70 | — |
| Ecuador | 2.30% | $11.50 | $488.50 | Read the guide |
| Nicaragua | 2.33% | $11.65 | $488.35 | Read the guide |
| Brazil | 2.42% | $12.10 | $487.90 | — |
| Colombia | 2.43% | $12.15 | $487.85 | Read the guide |
| Panama | 2.49% | $12.45 | $487.55 | — |
| Dominican Republic | 2.52% | $12.60 | $487.40 | Read the guide |
| Guatemala | 2.56% | $12.80 | $487.20 | Read the guide |
| Honduras | 2.62% | $13.10 | $486.90 | Read the guide |
| Mexico | 2.65% | $13.25 | $486.75 | Read the guide |
| Bolivia | 3.45% | $17.25 | $482.75 | Read the guide |
| Peru | 3.57% | $17.85 | $482.15 | Read the guide |
| Jamaica | 3.59% | $17.95 | $482.05 | — |
| Paraguay | 4.66% | $23.30 | $476.70 | — |
| Haiti | 4.70% | $23.50 | $476.50 | Read the guide |
| Guyana | 7.92% | $39.60 | $460.40 | — |
| Cuba | 19.63% | $98.15 | $401.85 | Read the guide |
What these numbers tell you
The gap between the cheapest and most expensive corridor is enormous. Sending to El Salvador costs an average of 2%. Sending to Cuba costs 19.63%: almost ten times more. On $500 that is $10 against nearly $100.
Most corridors from the United States to Latin America sit between 2% and 3%, among the cheapest in the world. That is a direct result of competition: these are high-volume routes with many providers fighting over them.
The expensive cases share one explanation: little competition. Where few providers operate, prices rise. That is why Cuba, with a sanctions framework that has pushed much of the industry away, sits where it does.
How to use this
This is a country average, not a price list. Use it as a yardstick: if your provider charges considerably more than your country average, you are overpaying and there are alternatives. If it charges less, you are doing fine.
To compare two specific providers with your own numbers, use the real cost of a remittance calculator, which adds fee plus margin and tells you how much actually arrives with each.
Data source
World Bank indicator Average transaction cost of sending remittances to a specific country, built from its Remittance Prices Worldwide database. Latest year available: 2023. Full series from 2016.
You can consult the original indicator. World Bank data is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, so you may reuse it with attribution. We have only filtered it for Latin America and the Caribbean.
It is an average across all sending countries to each destination, not only from the United States, and it does not cover every provider. Use it as a reference, not as an exact price.
More free tools: Credit card payoff calculator · Real cost of a remittance. You will find them all on the Tools page.