Transfer Fee Calculator

What this calculator is not

This is a static estimate built from published fee schedules, scoped to the providers a non-resident US LLC owner actually has access to. It does not quote a live exchange rate, and it does not cover consumer remittance corridors. For a real-time quote on a specific currency pair, Monito runs a live comparison engine across the consumer money-transfer market. It is not affiliated with Global Solo and this link earns us nothing — it answers a different question than this page does.

SWIFT wires: why the quoted fee is not the cost

SWIFT is a messaging network rather than a payment rail. It carries the instruction; the money itself moves through a chain of correspondent banks, and each institution in that chain can deduct a handling fee from the principal before passing it on. That is why a wire quoted at one number arrives at a smaller one, and why the shortfall shows up only after the fact — the deduction happens in transit, not at the point of quotation.

A SWIFT transfer therefore has four cost layers, and the calculator above models the first and the fourth: the sending bank's outgoing wire fee, any correspondent-bank deductions in transit, the receiving bank's incoming wire fee, and the exchange-rate margin applied at conversion. The margin is usually the largest of the four and the only one that never appears on a fee schedule. Which party absorbs the middle two depends on the charge code on the instruction (OUR, SHA, or BEN) — a field the sender chooses and the recipient rarely sees.

Wise, Payoneer, and Mercury do not put every transfer through that chain. Where they hold local banking access on both ends, the transfer settles on domestic rails and the correspondent layer disappears — which is the structural reason their cost differs from a bank wire, separate from any difference in headline pricing. Where they do not, the transfer is a SWIFT wire like any other. The estimates above assume the provider's standard route for the corridor selected; confirm the route with the provider before sizing a large transfer.

How this estimate is built

Each provider is modelled as the fee components its own published schedule lists, applied to the amount you enter, then converted at a representative mid-market rate less that provider's exchange-rate margin. The table gives every component, the figure as the source prints it, and the date we read it. Where a provider does not publish a figure, the row says so rather than filling the gap with a plausible number: unknown means the source is silent, estimate means the figure is ours and has no public source, derived means we computed it from the provider's own quotes.

Wise does not publish its fixed and variable components per corridor. We derived them on 2026-09-09 by taking two quotes per corridor from Wise's public comparison endpoint (1,000 USD and 10,000 USD) and solving for the two parts; the same quotes supplied the mid-market rates used above. Wise's pricing page states only "Fee varies by currency" and "From 0.23%", so the corridor figures here are ours, checked against Wise's own quotes, not Wise's published claim.

Bank-wire figures use Bank of America's posted schedule as the representative sending bank because it prints its outbound international fees publicly; other US banks sit in a similar band but their schedules differ. The 3% exchange-rate margin has no public source at any bank, which is why it is marked as an estimate: BoA's schedule says "exchange rate markups apply" and stops there.

When a wire is late or arrives short: ask for the UETR

Every payment instruction carried over SWIFT includes a Unique End-to-end Transaction Reference (UETR), a 36-character code that SWIFT itself describes as "very much like the tracking number couriers use when you send or receive a parcel". Intermediary banks are not allowed to replace it, so the same code follows the money from the sending bank to the receiving bank. Since November 2020 every bank on the network has been required to confirm to SWIFT's tracker when a customer payment is credited, put on hold, or rejected; SWIFT's own figures put nearly 60% of gpi payments in the beneficiary's account within 30 minutes and almost all within 24 hours.

What that means in practice: the sending bank can see where a payment is and which bank is holding it. The recipient usually cannot see the tracker, so the working move when a wire has not landed is to get the UETR from whoever sent it and have their bank read the status. The same tracker records the deductions taken at each hop, which is how a short arrival gets attributed to a specific correspondent rather than argued about.

The charge code decides who absorbs those deductions. On a SHA (shared) wire they come out of the principal in transit, which is Mercury's default for USD international wires; Mercury's OUR option, at a flat $15, has the sender cover them so the full amount arrives. Neither option covers the receiving bank's own incoming-wire fee, which Bank of America, for one, lists at $15. Sources for every figure in this paragraph are in the table above and on SWIFT's UETR and gpi pages.