FXC Intelligence data has highlighted the highest and lowest-cost remittance markets in 2025 based on a dataset containing 35 of the largest remittance markets globally. Below, we’ve shown the full ranking and highlighted key changes over time.
Our Consumer International Payments Pricing Data allows us to track pricing and transaction speeds across more than 17,000 corridors and in more than 175 countries. Using this data, we are able to find out which of the world’s largest remittance markets cost the most and least to send to in 2025, while also comparing how these have changed compared to previous years.
Similar to last year, we’ve assessed the costs across 35 major remittance destination markets using FXC Intelligence’s remittance market sizing data, excluding advanced economies where remittances are a small share of GDP. The cost is defined as the fees plus FX margin for sending the equivalent of $200 to each country, expressed as a percentage of the sending amount, based on an established set of providers and services.
We first found the average cost for each provider for sending money from each major sending market into a receiving country. Having done this for all providers, we then found the average cost across providers for each sending country into a receiving market and then calculated the average across the costs for all of the sending markets to establish the average for each receive country.
Highest-cost remittance markets in 2025
There have been some significant shifts in pricing this year, which has changed the ranking for the top 10 lowest-cost remittance markets. For 2025, the top 10 highest-cost countries were Lebanon, China, Morocco, Ukraine, Serbia, Haiti, Bangladesh, Thailand, Kyrgyz Republic and Vietnam.
For example, two of the main stories here are Haiti and Bangladesh, which ranked 21st and 22nd respectively when ranking by highest average cost for remittances in 2024. For 2025, both countries moved up this ranking by 15 positions, with Haiti moving into 6th and Bangladesh moving to 7th position. This is partly due to growing costs for sending to both countries, with Haiti seeing a 46% increase in transaction costs compared to 2024 and Bangladesh seeing a 51% increase.
Haiti remains an inherently unstable market, with comparatively few receiving services. Many of the markets that see the biggest impact and volatility on pricing are countries where there are fewer receiving services, as in these cases pricing changes across a few individual providers or the closure of some providers have larger impacts on average pricing than markets with larger numbers of services. Another example of this is in Peru, where the closure of Small World – which used to provide lower-cost transfers to the country – has likely contributed to an increase in the average cost.
However, it is also due to other countries moving significantly down the ranking (i.e. their average cost was lower YoY). In terms of the biggest ranking swings, Egypt and Ecuador both moved seven places down the ranking in terms of highest costs. El Salvador, Mexico and Nigeria all went down by six places, while Colombia went down by five places.
Ecuador’s movement down the highest cost list may be because some providers serving the country have seen a lowering of margins on EUR to USD transfers. Since the country uses USD and many of its transfers are USD to USD, the rest of this market is usually quite stable, meaning lower margins across EUR-USD corridors may be having an impact on average margins.
Another interesting movement is Ukraine, which rose four positions up the list and was the fourth-highest remittance cost destination from the assessed markets. Fees were waived by many providers after Russia’s invasion into the country and as some of these providers reimplement fees, we expect to see a return to pre-invasion levels (or higher).
Lowest cost remittance markets in 2025
Inverting the table of 35 destination markets we tracked, we can see which of the markets saw the lowest average costs for remittances. In other words, the countries in the graphic shown above are the equivalent of the 21st-35th countries on the list in order of highest-cost remittances, inverted to show the lowest cost at the top (e.g. Croatia was 35th on the highest-cost ranking, but on the lowest-cost ranking it is in 1st place).
Re-ranking the table in this order, we get a clearer sense of those markets for which transaction costs for remittances are relatively low compared to the other large remittance markets, as well as some cases where countries have actually seen costs decrease.
There have been some significant shifts in pricing this year, which has changed the ranking for the top 10 lowest-cost remittance markets. For 2025, the top 10 countries were Croatia, Pakistan, Poland, El Salvador, Hungary, Nepal, Uzbekistan, Romania, Guatemala and Sri Lanka.
While the top three countries in the ranking – Croatia, Pakistan and Poland – were the same as last year, El Salvador has moved from 10th position to number four, having seen the average cost to send to the market decline by 22% compared to 2024. Guatemala and Sri Lanka have both moved back into the top 10 (having previously been there in 2022 for Guatemala and 2021 for Sri Lanka), at 9th and 10th respectively, while Nepal has moved from 8th to 6th on the list.
Conversely, a number of countries have moved down the list. In particular, Bangladesh and Haiti have moved from being the 14th and 15th lowest-cost markets in 2024 to being 29th and 30th in 2025. Meanwhile, Romania has moved from 4th position in 2024 to 8th in 2025 and Yemen went from 9th in the list in 2024 to 18th in 2025.
Year-on-year changes in average remittance costs are not only driven by provider repricing. They can also reflect shifts in provider and service availability, such as route suspensions, discontinued pay-in/pay-out combinations and operational outages that change the mix of options captured.
Meanwhile, in destinations with FX controls or liquidity shortages, the FX-margin component can move because providers price against the effective market rate, which may be closer to a parallel rate than the official mid-market rate, shifting total costs even when headline fees are unchanged.
Over the last two years in Bangladesh, the taka’s effective exchange rate has diverged from the official mid-market rate to varying degrees. To maintain the stability of the Bangladeshi taka (BDT), the country relies heavily on remittances to help it meet its demand for foreign currencies. However, the BDT is pegged to the dollar on a crawling peg basis, meaning any slowdown in remittances (i.e. foreign currencies coming into Bangladesh) results in pressure on this peg.
In order to promote remittances to the country, in 2019 Bangladesh offered a 2% cash incentive on top of the value of remittances sent to Bangladesh, with this increasing to 2.5% in 2022. These variables have an effect on the stability of the cost when sending to this market. The unstable nature of some currencies and their YoY costs can also be seen in Yemen, which has a similar dynamic with parallel rates causing additional volatility in pricing.
Mexico, Jamaica and the Philippines joined the bottom of the top 15 lowest-cost remittance corridors for 2025, driven by some providers reducing pricing as well as movement from other countries across the list. The Philippines also saw the inclusion of some new providers that have below-average costs
Remittance costs over time
Once again, we’ve broken out how the ranking has changed across these markets over time to give a broader view of how the lowest-cost large remittance markets have changed since 2021. In the period from 2021 to 2025, Croatia, Hungary and Romania have moved up the lowest cost ranking the most, while Bangladesh, the Kyrgyz Republic and Nigeria have fallen down the ranking by the highest amount.
As always, it’s worth remembering that positions on the ranking didn’t always move upwards or downwards as a result of actual changes in their transaction costs. For example, the Dominican Republic saw average costs fall by 0.1% from 2024 to 2025, but its ranking in the lowest cost remittance order for 2025 fell to 16 – from 13 in 2024. Conversely, Honduras saw its average cost fall by 1.2%, but its ranking went down from 19 to 20.
Looking at the actual underlying cost data shows that from 2024 to 2025, 23 of the markets on the list saw a reduction in the average cost of sending remittances. However, when comparing on a longer time scale, just 15 of the markets on the list saw a lower average cost in 2025 than in 2021. This highlights the importance of tracking these metrics over a longer period, particularly given the existence of initiatives such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals target to cut transfer costs to under 3% by 2030.
As our analysis of the FSB’s G20 progress report on remittances shows, pricing, digitalisation competition in the space remain crucial for bringing down global remittance costs, though these have remained almost unchanged throughout 2023-2025, with the global average cost of sending $200 rising from 6.4% in 2024 to 6.5% in 2025 – well above the 3% goal.
For the full underlying data for these markets, and for other consumer remittance pricing and speed data worldwide, read more about our product here and get in contact today.
