How Much are Hidden Currency Exchange Fees Costing You? (Infographic)

When you send money to another country, you’re not always sending as much as you think.

Let me show you some of the different fees that are being taken from you as you send money across the globe using services like PayPal.

The cheapest legitimate transfer method on PayPal is “Mass Pay”. This is an easy way to pay several people at once by uploading a CSV spreadsheet of all the payment amounts. The cost is usually 2% to a maximum of $20 for offshore payments.

There are also global payments that PayPal charges for their currency conversion fee which is actually a hidden fee. We have found that this fee comes out to be about 2.5% of the money sent.

And finally, there may be additional fees that banks are charging your employees to withdraw the money from PayPal and transferring it to their personal bank accounts.

But this infographic isn’t just about PayPal.

Almost all services that you use to transfer money to your employees have hidden fees attached to it. We’ve essentially broken down the infographic into two parts.

In the top half, we’ve created a hypothetical scenario in which you send $5,000 to employees to the Phillipines. We break down how much airports, banks, credit cards, Western Union, PayPal, Moneygram, and Ria Money Transfer extract from you.

In the bottom half, we show you some of the higher exchange fees we’ve seen across multiple countries and payment platforms. (Note: These fees are once again based on transferring $5,000.)