Every six hours we record what each money transfer provider would actually deliver to a recipient, on every corridor we track. The archive behind these studies holds 6,460,325 quote observations going back to March 10, 2026. These 9 datasets are what comes out of it — each with its method, its limits, and the figures it actually supports.
Of 155 provider choices readers made on our comparison in September 2026, 85% paid more than the median provider on that corridor and day, and the chosen provider paid a median $31.23 more per $1,000 than the median bank quote.
195 Google Analytics provider choices across 54 corridors, 2026-09-01 to 2026-09-30, each priced against the quote snapshot archived for its corridor that day. Choices that cannot be priced fairly are counted and named, not dropped silently.
Wise promises delivery within a day on 86% of its quotes for 1,000 dollars, pounds or euros asked on a Monday and 63% on a Saturday; on 27% of the provider-and-route pairs that two sources describe, the times they publish are at least a day apart; and 7 of our 9 timed test transfers were paid out within two minutes.
93,373 delivery estimates from Wise's own calculator and the times Monito and RemitRoutes publish, archived from 2026-03-28 to 2026-10-09, plus 9 transfers we sent and timed from each app's own status timeline. Everything archived is a promise; the tests time the provider's last step, not the recipient bank's credit.
No provider is cheapest everywhere. TapTap Send is the most frequent winner on 66 of 214 corridors, and on 26% of corridors the provider that is cheapest today is not the one that usually wins.
123,794 provider-day observations across 214 corridors with a genuine comparison, over 91 days. A day counts only when two or more providers quoted.
Banks cost 1.40× what specialist apps cost on the same corridors — 3.13% of the amount sent against 2.23%. Against the cheapest provider on the same corridor, a bank transfer loses 2.80% on average.
196 bank quotes and 449 specialist quotes at $1,000, across 98 corridors and 28 banks.
Specialist providers cost an average of $25.65 in fees and exchange-rate markup on a $1,000 transfer; banks cost $38.14.
62 providers priced across 991 corridors carrying at least one quote at the headline amount — a wider base than the 214 corridors with a sustained multi-provider record. True total cost = the gap between what a mid-market transfer would deliver and what the provider actually delivers, so it captures the fee and the markup together.
Weekends are marginally cheaper, not dearer: a mean markup of 1.54% at weekends against 1.60% on weekdays, a difference of 0.052 percentage points. Which provider you choose is a far larger lever than which day you send.
6,460,325 quote observations from 534 snapshots of the 100 providers in our quote archive (it keeps providers that have since stopped quoting), 2026-03-10 to 2026-10-22, corrected for uneven sampling with outliers quarantined rather than dropped silently.
Sending $100 costs 4.22% of the amount against 2.20% at $1,000, and the cheapest provider is not the same at both — InstaReM at the smaller amount, Sendwave at the larger.
18 providers with 20+ usable quotes at both amounts. No $10,000 tier is published — only 11 providers quote at that amount, roughly one per corridor.
Of the 208 corridors where enough providers compete to score one, 70% currently read "good" or better as a time to send.
A 0–100 rating from four weighted components, computed from a median of 208 days of recorded provider rates per corridor. Single-provider corridors are excluded from the distribution rather than counted as neutral.
What a transfer is worth on arrival depends more on local price levels than on the fee. The study pairs our live transfer costs with World Bank PPP conversion factors across 83 countries.
World Bank PPP and GNI indicators, refreshed against live quotes. The interactive version is the salary-abroad calculator.
These datasets are published under CC BY 4.0. Quote the figures, reproduce the tables or build on the data — commercial use included — and cite SendMoneyCompare with a link to the study page. Each study states the date of the data behind it — please cite that date rather than the date you read it, because the figures move with the scrape.
Raw data. 4 of these studies publish their underlying table as a CORS-open CSV, so a figure can be checked against the row that produced it: Delivery speed: promised vs paid out, Provider Consistency Index, Bank vs App Transfer Cost Index, Transfer cost by amount. There is also a public quotes endpoint for AI assistants.
Method and corrections. How the underlying quotes are collected and costs calculated is set out in our methodology. Where we have got something wrong and fixed it, it is logged in corrections. For questions about a dataset, or a cut of it we do not publish, get in touch.
See also: how the quotes are collected and what comparing saved our readers.
Analysis by
Ahsan MukhtarFounder & CEO
Ahsan Mukhtar is the founder and CEO of SendMoneyCompare, where he owns the ranking methodology and fact-checks provider reviews.
Corrections and independence: figures move with the scrape, so cite the data date above rather than the date you read this. Where we have published something wrong and fixed it, it is logged in corrections. No provider can buy a ranking or a place in these datasets — see our editorial policy and methodology.