Wire transfer fee calculator
How many hands skim a SWIFT wire on the way over? Enter the amount, the cable fee, the number of correspondent banks and who pays the charges, and see the total cost, what the recipient actually gets, and how big a share the cost is.
What this calculator is doing
The cost of a SWIFT wire on the way over is mostly three flat charges stacked together:
- Cable fee / sending-bank fee: the flat charge your bank takes, unrelated to the amount.
- Correspondent-bank charges: before the money reaches the recipient's account it may pass through 0–2 intermediary banks, and each hop takes a cut.
- Receiving-bank credit fee: what the recipient's bank charges to credit or release the funds.
Who pays decides which of those three falls on whom: OUR means the sender covers the cable and correspondent fees, so the recipient gets roughly the amount minus the receiving-bank fee; SHA means costs are shared—you pay the cable fee, while the correspondent and receiving-bank fees come out of the wired amount; BEN means every charge comes out of the wired amount, so the recipient gets the least.
Cable fees and correspondent deductions vary a lot between banks and routes, and you can't fully know the number of hops in advance. This uses the figures you entered to make an estimate; the real cost is whatever the sending bank shows and what actually lands in the account.
How to use it, and lose less
Enter your bank's real cable fee, then try OUR and SHA in turn and watch how much the recipient receives differs—that usually makes the right choice obvious. Small wires are the worst value: the flat fees take a big share, and a few-hundred transfer can lose a tenth or two. When the amount is small, a local transfer or a multi-currency account is usually cheaper. For the full cost structure of cross-border transfers, read how to spend less on cross-border transfers and the Wise multi-currency account. For the spread on the exchange leg, check the mid-rate with the currency converter.