Is it cheaper to send money on a weekday? We checked 5,369,065 quotes.
By Ahsan Mukhtar · Data 10 March 2026 – 3 October 2026 · Updated 3 October 2026
Short answer: no. The common advice to avoid weekends does not hold up. Across 5,369,065 quote observations, weekend FX markup averaged 1.511% against 1.574% Monday to Friday — weekends came out 0.063 percentage points cheaper, not more expensive.
But the average hides the real story. Who you send with changes your cost far more than when you send. BNZ widens its margin by 1.24pp at weekends; OCBC moves the other way by 1.2pp.
In this guide
Markup by day of week
Average FX markup against the mid-market rate, by the day the quote was collected. Lower is better. The spread between the cheapest and dearest day is a fraction of a percentage point.
| Day | Mean markup | Median | Observations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | 1.454% | 0.984% | 777,542 |
| Mon | 1.633% | 1.095% | 678,232 |
| Tue | 1.492% | 1.004% | 560,505 |
| Wed | 1.542% | 1.036% | 642,938 |
| Thu | 1.536% | 1.034% | 642,602 |
| Fri | 1.667% | 1.110% | 1,445,265 |
| Sat | 1.568% | 1.027% | 621,981 |
Who charges more at the weekend
This is where the effect is real. Interbank markets close at the weekend, so a provider quoting on Saturday cannot hedge until Monday. Providers that set rates by hand widen their spread to cover that risk; providers pricing algorithmically against a live feed mostly do not.
| Provider | Mon–Fri | Sat–Sun | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| BNZ | 1.76% | 3.00% | +1.24pp |
| National Australia Bank | 2.74% | 3.62% | +0.88pp |
| NAB | 2.68% | 3.40% | +0.72pp |
| Hsbc Australia | 2.96% | 3.62% | +0.66pp |
| China Construction Bank HK | 2.01% | 2.61% | +0.60pp |
| OFX | 3.34% | 3.84% | +0.50pp |
| Scotiabank | 3.30% | 3.77% | +0.47pp |
| HSBC HK | 2.17% | 2.64% | +0.46pp |
…and who gets cheaper
| Provider | Mon–Fri | Sat–Sun | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| OCBC | 3.36% | 2.16% | -1.20pp |
| PostFinance | 3.83% | 3.22% | -0.61pp |
| Remitly | 1.19% | 0.83% | -0.37pp |
| Deutsche Bank | 2.58% | 2.27% | -0.31pp |
| TransferGo | 1.33% | 1.03% | -0.31pp |
| The Royal Bank Of Scotland | 2.33% | 2.06% | -0.27pp |
The lever that actually matters
Timing moves your cost by fractions of a percentage point. Provider choice moves it by whole percent. UniCredit averaged 5.98% markup on weekdays; Unplex averaged -1.27% — roughly 0 times cheaper, every day of the week.
Lowest markup
| Unplex | -1.27% | -1.30% |
| Profee | 0.01% | -0.17% |
| KOHO | 0.08% | 0.17% |
| Starling | 0.11% | 0.38% |
| SingX | 0.23% | 0.31% |
Highest markup
| UniCredit | 5.98% | 6.02% |
| Santander Uk | 5.58% | 5.93% |
| Sabadell | 5.47% | 5.41% |
| LaCaixa | 5.36% | 5.49% |
| ING Germany | 5.32% | 5.60% |
Compare live rates for your corridor — or read the Bank vs App Cost Index for the same question framed by provider type rather than timing.
How we measured this
We archive every provider quote our scrapers collect. For each archived quote we compare the rate the provider offered against the real mid-market rate for that currency pair on that date, and express the gap as a percentage. That is the provider’s FX markup — the part of the cost that is not an advertised fee.
This run covers 5,369,065 observations from 451 daily snapshots between 10 March 2026 and 3 October 2026, across 97 providers and banks. Quotes are grouped by the UTC day of week they were collected.
A sanity check on the method: it recovers Wise’s published business model without being told to.Wise states it uses the mid-market rate and charges an explicit fee instead of a margin — and it measures at 0.48% weekday markup, essentially zero. If the method were broken, that number would not land where the company says it should.
Limitations
- FX markup only. Advertised transfer fees are excluded, so a provider with a low margin and a high flat fee looks better here than it may be for small transfers.
- Weekend rates are measured against Friday’s close, because interbank markets are shut. That is the correct comparison — it is the rate the provider could actually have hedged against — but it means a weekend “premium” reflects the spread a provider adds for holding unhedged risk, not a mid-market move.
- Row counts vary by day. Our scrapers do not all run on the same cadence, so some weekdays contribute several times more rows than others. Headline weekday and weekend figures are therefore the unweighted mean of the seven per-day averages, so no single day can dominate. Per-provider figures compare a provider only against itself.
- Providers need at least 300 observations on each side of the weekday/weekend split to appear. 2 providers were held back for showing an implausible mean markup above 8% — far outside the range of any legitimate retail price, and more likely a bad upstream row than a real quote. We would rather exclude it than name a firm on a number we cannot corroborate.
Data licensed CC BY 4.0. If you cite this analysis, please link back to this page.