Are these real prices from named companies?
No. They are a documented model built from typical retail ranges per route type. The purpose is to show how the routes rank and how that ranking shifts with amount, not to quote a specific provider.
Comparison tool
Remittance Comparator
Advertised fees and headline rates are designed not to be comparable. This tool reduces every route to the number that actually reaches your recipient, and tells you which one wins at your transfer size.
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Best value for this transfer
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Ranked results
Every route, ordered by what arrives
| Route | Margin | Fixed fee | Arrives | Total cost | Speed |
|---|
Original analysis
Which route wins at which amount
Fixed fees punish small transfers and percentage margins punish large ones, so the winner changes as the amount grows. This sweep finds the cheapest route at every transfer size.
| If you send | Cheapest route | Beats the worst route by | Cost as % of amount |
|---|
Why nobody’s price is comparable
Two companies quoting the same corridor will present the cost in completely different ways, and neither is lying. One charges a visible fee and prices close to the reference rate. The other charges nothing and takes a wider margin out of the rate. A third quotes a rate, a fee, and a third-party deduction the recipient discovers later. Comparing them by fee is meaningless and comparing them by rate is almost as bad, because the rate each one quotes was chosen by that same company.
There is exactly one number that survives contact with all of these structures: how much lands in the recipient’s account. Once you insist on that figure, every route collapses into a single comparable amount, and the ranking becomes obvious. It also exposes the real magnitude of the decision — on a mid-sized transfer the gap between the best and worst route is commonly larger than a month of the recipient’s rent.
The amount-dependence nobody warns you about
A twenty-five pound fixed fee is twenty-five percent of a hundred pound transfer and a rounding error on a ten thousand pound transfer. Because of that arithmetic, the route that wins for someone sending birthday money to a student is often not the route that wins for someone moving a house deposit. Flat-fee routes look worst at small amounts and best at large ones; percentage-only routes are the reverse.
The sweep table above exists because this is genuinely counter-intuitive. Most comparison articles rank providers once and stop, which silently answers the question for whatever amount the author happened to pick. The correct answer depends on your number.
How to use this in practice
Find the row closest to your transfer size, note the winning route class, then get two live quotes from providers in that class and compare their landed amounts. Two quotes is almost always enough, because within a route class the differences are small compared with the gaps between classes. Our guide to sending money internationally covers the documentation and timing issues that affect whether money actually arrives, and the transfer fee guide explains each cost layer in detail.
Frequently asked questions
Why is cash pickup usually more expensive?
Cash networks carry physical handling, agent commission and fraud costs, and they can charge more because immediacy is valuable to the sender.
Do intermediary bank deductions appear here?
They are folded into the bank wire route’s modelled cost, since that is the route where they occur. Actual deductions depend on the specific banks in the chain.
What about transfer speed?
Each row shows typical settlement time. Faster is not always dearer, but routes that pay out instantly generally price that convenience into the margin.
Accuracy and limits
This tool is educational and is not financial advice. Cost figures are a transparent model based on documented typical retail ranges for each route type, published on our editorial standards page. They are not quotes, and your own provider’s pricing will differ by country, funding method, promotion and account type. Always confirm the landed amount before committing money.