# What a wire actually costs: the full anatomy of $45 + $30 + $15 + 2.5% > A $10,000 international wire costs $340: $45 to send, $30 to correspondents, $15 to receive, and 2.5% hidden in the rate. Itemized, by who takes what. Canonical: https://fasset.com/business/blog/what-a-wire-actually-costs/ AH Ayman Hassen Head of Business Banking, Fasset · September 2026 [A tall bar stepping down through four deductions to a shorter bar] A typical international USD wire costs $340 on $10,000. That is $45 charged by the sending bank, about $30 taken by correspondent banks along the route, $15 charged by the receiving bank, and roughly 2.5% buried in the exchange rate, which is $250. It takes 1 to 3 business days, and only the first $45 appears anywhere your client will ever look. Four parties charge for one payment. Here is what each of them is actually doing. ## Who takes the $45, and for what? The sending bank. This is the outgoing international wire fee on a US business account, and it is the only number in the whole chain that your client sees before they press send. It buys the composition and transmission of a SWIFT message and the bank's own compliance screening on the payment. The fee is flat, which tells you something. It costs a bank almost the same to send a $500 wire as a $500,000 one, and the price is set by what the market tolerates rather than by the work. Some banks charge $35, some charge $50, and a few waive it on premium accounts while quietly taking a wider spread instead. ## What is the $30 correspondent fee? The toll for banks that are not your bank and not your client's bank. SWIFT is a messaging network. It does not move money. It tells one bank that another bank has instructed a payment, and the money itself moves across accounts the banks hold with each other. When your bank in Dhaka or Karachi has no direct account relationship with your client's bank in Chicago, the payment has to hop through one or two institutions that do have relationships with both. Each hop is a real bank doing real settlement, and each one charges $15 to $30 for it. Two things make this fee worse than its size. It is deducted from the payment in flight, so the amount that arrives is lower than the amount that was sent and nobody warned either party. And the number of hops depends on a routing decision made inside the banking network, so the same client sending the same amount to the same account can pay $15 one month and $60 the next. There is a SWIFT field that lets the sender agree to cover all charges, and it is worth asking your client to use it. It does not remove the fee. It moves it. ## Why does the receiving bank charge $15? Because it can. The incoming wire fee is charged by your own bank for accepting money into your own account, and it is deducted before the balance shows. In several of the markets we work in it is charged as a percentage with a minimum, so a large receipt costs more to accept than a small one, for identical work. Add the three together and the visible cost of a wire is $90, regardless of amount. That is the part on the receipts. Now the part that is not. ## Where does the 2.5% hide? In the exchange rate, which is why it is the largest line and the least discussed. There is one real rate for any currency pair, the mid-market rate, sitting midway between what buyers are bidding and what sellers are asking. It is the rate you see when you search a currency pair. It is not the rate you are given. Banks quote a rate some distance away from it and keep the difference, and most business customers in our markets are quoted 2 to 4% away. We model 2.5% as the midpoint. On $10,000 that is $250. It appears on no statement, has no line item, and is fully compatible with a bank truthfully telling you the transfer had a flat fee. This is also why a bank can advertise a free international transfer with a straight face. ## What does a wire cost at other amounts? The $90 of flat fees stays flat and the spread scales, so the shape of the cost changes completely as the invoice grows. At $1,000 the fees are 78% of the damage. At $50,000 they are 7%. | Amount sent | Flat fees | 2.5% in the rate | Total cost | Fasset, Business plan | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | $1,000 | $90 | $25 | $115 | $12 | | $5,000 | $90 | $125 | $215 | $60 | | $10,000 | $90 | $250 | $340 | $120 | | $50,000 | $90 | $1,250 | $1,340 | $600 | Accurate as of September 2026. Flat fees are $45 send plus $30 correspondent plus $15 receive, from US bank fee schedules. The rate markup is modelled at 2.5%, the midpoint of the 2 to 4% most banks apply to business customers. The Fasset column is the Business plan price to pay out in local currency, 1.2% with a $2 minimum, on a plan that is $29 a month; an incoming USD wire adds $10, and Enterprise is on the pricing page. Check your own amount in the transfer fee calculator. The practical reading of that table: if you invoice in small amounts, negotiate the fees. If you invoice in large amounts, the fees are noise and the only number that matters is the spread. Almost every business we talk to has spent time arguing about $15 and none arguing about $250. $340 → $120 The same $10,000 invoice, paid out in local currency on the Fasset Business plan. ## What does a modern rail change? It removes the hops and it prices the conversion openly. USDT, a stablecoin designed to track the US dollar, settles in about 20 seconds. There is no correspondent chain, because there is nothing to correspond: the transfer is a single movement rather than a relay between four institutions. You do not need an exchange account. You see dollars in and dollars out, and the rail is handled for you. Conversion is then a separate, visible price rather than a hidden one. On the Fasset Business plan, paying $10,000 out in local currency costs $120, which is 1.2% (the $2 minimum only applies to small payouts), against $340 by wire. The plan itself is $29 a month. Every plan is priced on the pricing page, and the price of each transfer, a wire included, is shown before you confirm. Scale that. An agency billing $30,000 a month in three $10,000 invoices pays about $12,240 a year in wire costs on these numbers, and $9,000 of it is in the rate. Put your own volume into the transfer fee calculator to see what a priced rail changes. ## Is a wire ever the right choice? Yes. If your counterparty is a large enterprise whose accounts payable system only knows how to send a wire, you take the wire and you build the cost into the price. If you need a payment to arrive with a specific regulatory reference through a specific authorised dealer bank, the wire is the route that produces the paperwork. If the amount is small enough that $90 of fees is trivial and you value the familiarity, that is a real answer too. What is not defensible is paying 2.5% without knowing you are paying it. Take your last international payment, find the mid-market rate for that day, compare it to the rate you were given, and multiply the gap by the amount. Thirty seconds, and it is usually the largest fee you have never seen. Fasset Business is a technology platform, not a bank. Banking, payment and card services are provided by licensed third-party institutions in each market, and client funds are held at those institutions, separately from Fasset's own money. ## Open your account The application runs entirely online. Or walk through the product first, with sample data and no signup. - Open an account - See the demo Client funds are held separately from Fasset’s own. ## Related reading - **Mid-market rate, explained:** The 2.5% has a name. Here is how to check any quote against the real rate. - **IBAN vs account number vs routing number:** Which identifier your client needs, and what happens when they use the wrong one. - **USDT for business payments, used as a dollar rail:** What the rail does, what it costs, and why it stays in the background.