GCC Remittance Cost Ranking 2023
Average cost of sending money out of each Gulf country, and what that cost adds up to in fees — computed from official World Bank series, same reference year across all rows.
Estimated — reference year 2023
US$4.6B
lost to remittance fees across the five GCC sender countries in 2023
(total outflow US$126.5B).
The league table — cheapest to most expensive
| # | Country | Avg outbound cost | YoY | Outflow 2023 | Est. fee leakage 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kuwait | 2.42% | -0.06 pp | US$12.7B | US$306M |
| 2 | United Arab Emirates | 3.08% | +0.72 pp | US$54.0B | US$1.7B |
| 3 | Qatar | 4.31% | +0.69 pp | US$11.8B | US$507M |
| 4 | Oman | 4.44% | +0.52 pp | US$9.4B | US$419M |
| 5 | Saudi Arabia | 4.52% | +3.33 pp | US$38.6B | US$1.7B |
Methodology & sources
- Source: World Bank Open Data — BM.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT (personal remittances, paid, current US$) and SI.RMT.COST.OB.ZS (average cost of sending remittances from a specific country, %), CC BY 4.0. Outflow series last updated 2026-07-13; cost series last updated 2026-07-13. Retrieved 2026-07-18.
- The leakage figure is an estimate: annual outflow × average outbound cost of the same reference year. Outflow figures for years without a matching cost observation are shown as raw volume only and are never multiplied against an older cost rate.
- SI.RMT.COST.OB.ZS is an unweighted average across the corridors surveyed by the World Bank at US$200 and US$500 transaction sizes — the real corridor mix of each country differs, which is why the leakage number is labelled an estimate.
- The World Bank revises series retroactively; this page is rebuilt from a dated, versioned snapshot so published numbers stay traceable to their retrieval date.
- This page is a factual data record. It does not recommend any remittance provider.
- The league table uses reference year 2023 — the most recent year in which all five GCC countries have BOTH an outflow and a cost observation, so every row is compared on the same basis.
Cite this data
Copy-paste citation:
GCC Remittance Cost Ranking 2023 — the fee leakage league table. gulfforexpro.com. Underlying data: World Bank Open Data (BM.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT; SI.RMT.COST.OB.ZS), CC BY 4.0, series last updated 2026-07-13. Retrieved 2026-07-18. https://gulfforexpro.com/gcc-remittance-cost-ranking/Open dataset: JSON · CSV (same numbers as the tables on this page; free to reuse with attribution).