How to Work Out the Real Cost of Sending Money to Nepal

Working out what a remittance really costs is subtraction, and hardly anyone does it. You look at the fee on the screen, the fee looks small, you send the money. The fee is the easiest number to read, and it is usually not the one costing you the most.

What follows is a method, not a shortlist of companies. Which provider comes out ahead depends on how much you send, what currency you send from, and the week you happen to send it, so any list would be out of date before it was typed. This piece stays with the arithmetic, and with what you can actually find out before you commit. How the money physically gets to Nepal is a separate question and a separate article.

Reviewed on 2026-09-26

Fees, rates and cut-off times change constantly, and nothing here is a quote or financial advice. Get today's numbers from your provider before you send.

The fee on the screen

The quoted fee can be flat, a slice of the amount, or tiered so that it drops once you cross some threshold the provider has decided on. Whatever shape it takes, the number to write down is the total that leaves your account, not the headline figure in the advert. They are not always the same thing.

Correspondent banks and other intermediaries in the chain can take a slice in transit, which means what lands in Nepal is not always your quoted amount minus your quoted fee. So ask, before you press send, what the recipient will receive in rupees. If the person at the counter or on the chat window cannot tell you, you will be reading it off the receipt afterwards, which is a late moment to be finding out.

One thing worth holding on to: a small fee on a poor rate is a bad deal, and a bigger fee on a rate close to the market midpoint can be a good one. The fee by itself tells you very little. Which is why the next part matters more.

The rate is where the money actually goes

The rate you are offered is where the real money sits, and it is the part most people never check. The reference point is the mid-market rate: the midpoint between the buy and sell prices in the wholesale currency market, the figure financial news services publish for a given day. You cannot transact at it as an individual. It is a yardstick, nothing more.

Working out the margin does not need anything clever. Take the mid-market rate for your currency pair on the day. Take the rate your provider is applying. Subtract the second from the first, and divide by the mid-market rate. What you are left with is the provider's cut, expressed as a slice of your money rather than as a line on a receipt.

Per unit of currency that gap looks like nothing, which is exactly why it slips past people at the counter. But it is charged on the whole amount being converted, while the fee is charged once. On a small transfer the fee can dominate. As the amount grows, the rate pulls further and further ahead. That single trade-off explains most of the arguments about which way of sending is cheaper.

Do the comparison properly, though. Same day, same currency pair, roughly the same hour as your quote. A rate you remember from last week compared against a quote from this morning tells you nothing about what you are being charged today, because the underlying market has moved in between.

The cost of waiting

The fuzziest line on the sheet, and the one people skip. How many working days does the money take, and what does a day of it cost at the receiving end?

If the household is waiting on rent, a hospital bill or a school fee, a three-day settlement is not the same thing as a same-day one. The difference is often covered quietly by borrowing from someone local at terms nobody writes down, which is a real cost even when it never appears on your receipt. Weekend cut-offs in the sending country, the way banks batch and release transfers, and Nepali public holidays all feed into this number. Write down the number of days you were quoted and what a day of delay actually costs where the money is going. If you cannot estimate it, ask the person receiving it.

A worksheet you fill in yourself

There are no figures in this table on purpose. Any number typed here would be wrong by next week, and a wrong number is worse than a blank one. Fill it in from the quote in front of you.

The arithmetic only works if you are consistent about what goes in. "Amount sent" means the full amount debited from your account, fee included, not the amount before the fee. The mid-market rate is quoted as NPR per one unit of your sending currency, which is how news services and central banks publish it. Get either of those wrong and the result will look wrong while being perfectly correct.

Keep the receipts. Run the same sheet on the same route every time you send, and you will notice the moment something shifts: a rate that quietly gets worse, a fee that appears out of nowhere, a transfer that starts taking a day longer than it used to. That is the value of the exercise, more than the total on any single line.

Before you send through anyone, find the company on the central bank's published list of licensed institutions. Nepal Rastra Bank licenses remittance providers, and a name that does not appear there is a name to walk away from.

Corridors differ in what you can find out, not in the arithmetic

None of the sums above change with the country you send from. What changes is how much of the sheet you can fill in from the sending end, and where the weight sits between fee, rate and delay.

• Gulf (UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait). This corridor exists because of labour migration, and most of it is small, frequent transfers sent on or near payday. Exchange houses and bank-to-bank transfers do most of the work, with apps taking more of it every year. Expect to be asked for a passport, and often for a labour permit or work ID as well. Because the amounts are modest and the dates are predictable, the flat fee can matter more here than it does elsewhere, but check the margin anyway. Cut-off timing usually decides when the money lands more than the day's rate does.
• Malaysia. A long-standing labour corridor, with exchange houses still carrying a large share and apps steadily taking more. Work permit and passport details apply. Transfers tend to be regular and similar in size, which makes this the easiest corridor to track month to month, since you are comparing like with like instead of guessing which month was unusual.
• Korea. Money usually moves out of Korean bank accounts rather than through cash agents, and often arrives from workers who came through the government-to-government labour scheme. Some employers run savings or insurance arrangements alongside wages, so transfers are frequently scheduled rather than ad hoc. Set amounts on set dates make the worksheet almost pure: the only variables left are the rate you are given and the day it lands, which is exactly the kind of thing a running sheet exposes.
• United States. Diaspora and student driven, settled through bank accounts and apps rather than cash agents. Transfers here tend to be larger and less frequent than Gulf ones, which shifts the weight toward the exchange-rate margin and away from the flat fee. Bank transfers often move in batches on business days, so one started late on a Friday can sit until the following Monday before it even begins the journey. Compliance questions tend to come from the sending side, so keep the receipt and be ready to explain where the funds came from.

When the money has to arrive now

Urgency removes almost everything from the worksheet except timing. A few practical things decide whether the money lands when it is needed.

Delivery method comes first. A bank deposit, a cash pickup and a wallet transfer settle on different schedules, and which is fastest depends on the district and on the receiving bank, not on the provider's advert. Ask the recipient which point near them actually hands over cash, and whether it is open when they can get there. Some branches in some districts simply do not do pickups, and no amount of calling the helpline changes that.

Next, identity. Cash pickup and most wallet collections need the recipient's citizenship certificate, passport or licence, and the name on it has to match the name on the transfer. A mismatch is the usual reason money sits in a queue while everyone waits for an answer. Spell the name the way the document spells it, including the middle name if there is one, and warn the recipient to bring the right document the first time.

Then the clock. Sending-country cut-offs, weekends, bank processing, and Nepali public holidays all feed into the arrival date. A transfer started after the cut-off on a Friday generally moves on the next working day rather than that evening, and if the receiving end is in the middle of a holiday stretch, the answer is that it lands when work resumes. Working that out before sending is worth more than the fee difference between two providers.

Finally, review holds. If a transfer is stopped for checks, the questions go to the sender, not to the recipient. Keep the receipt, stay reachable on whatever number you gave, and have something ready that shows where the money came from. The person waiting in Nepal cannot sort this out on your behalf.

What the sheet is for

Run it a few times and you will know what your route actually costs you, in rupees, rather than what it costs on the poster. That is the entire point. The worksheet is not there to hunt down the smallest headline fee, which is usually the least useful figure on the page. It is there so the amount leaving your account, and the amount arriving at the other end, stop being a guess.

Fill it in once and you have a number. Fill it in every time for a year and you have something better: a record of what your route really charges, so that when a provider changes its rate or slips in a new fee, you notice it on your own sheet instead of hearing about it from the person waiting for the money.

No comparison site will do that part for you. They do not know your corridor, your amount or the day you send, and they are usually paid by the companies they rank. A few minutes with a pen after each transfer gets you closer to the truth than any of them, and it keeps working when the adverts change.