Sending a cheque abroad: why it is slow and what can go wrong

Somebody, somewhere, will still tell you that a cheque is the easy way to pay a person in another country. It feels easy for the sender. Write, sign, post. The effort is all on the receiving end, and so is the risk, and so, usually, are the fees.

This guide is for the person who has to decide whether to send one, or whether to accept one. The short version: a foreign cheque is a payment instruction that has to be physically carried through two banking systems that mostly stopped talking to each other on paper decades ago.

What actually happens to a foreign cheque

A cheque is an order to the sender’s bank: pay this person this amount. Nothing moves when you hand it over. The money moves only when the bank it was drawn on agrees to pay.

Say the cheque is drawn on a bank in another country: your bank cannot just pull the money. It has to ask. Banks describe two ways of doing that, and the difference matters more than anything else in this guide.

Negotiation. Your bank advances you the money first, then goes and tries to collect it. UK banks that offer this describe credits arriving in a few working days. One high-street bank gives 2 to 5 working days across its help pages. But the advance comes with recourse: if the cheque is returned, the bank takes the money back out of your account. That recourse can last up to seven years, according to the same bank, which says a cheque can come back unpaid for reasons relating to fraud.

Collection. Your bank sends the cheque away and waits. You see nothing until the overseas bank pays. UK bank help pages put this at several weeks, with figures ranging from six weeks to up to twelve weeks depending on the bank and the country. One comparison site says seven weeks or more.

Which route you get is the bank’s call, not yours. Banks usually say the choice depends on the individual cheque, and one UK bank says it decides case by case. Practice varies, so ask which route yours will take before you pay it in.

Where the money leaks

Cheques look free. They are not, and the charges are rarely shown to the sender at all.

Three layers can take a cut. Your own bank may charge a handling fee: one UK bank’s range, as reported by a comparison site, runs from £5 to £60 depending on the cheque’s value. The overseas bank that pays the cheque may charge its own fee. And your bank converts the money at its own rate, which may not be a competitive one. One US university finance office puts it bluntly: both its bank and the foreign bank charge, and the fees can exceed the value of the check in some cases.

There’s a fourth leak you can’t see in advance. Under collection you generally get the rate on the day the cheque clears, not the day it was written. Seven weeks is a long time for a currency to wander. See the mid-market rate versus the rate you get for why the bank’s rate and the headline rate differ.

A worked example (all numbers illustrative)

Say a made-up reader called Dana is owed US$600 by a client in the US and ends up with a US-dollar cheque to pay into a UK account. For the arithmetic, suppose the mid-market rate that day is 0.76 pounds per dollar. Check the real pair on USD to GBP; ours is invented.

Cheque route: the overseas bank takes US$10 and Dana’s bank takes £12. Her bank also applies a margin of 4% to the rate, so 0.76 becomes about 0.7296. She gets (600 − 10) × 0.7296 − 12 = about £418.46.
Bank transfer route: a US$5 fee and a 0.8% margin. She gets (600 − 5) × 0.76 × 0.992 = about £448.58.

At the mid-market rate US$600 is worth £456.00. The cheque loses about £37.54 of that, roughly 8.2%. The transfer loses about £7.42, about 1.6%. Different fees and margins will move these numbers around. The point is the shape: a cheque tends to pile charges on top of each other, and nobody puts the total on a single line.

And Dana waits six weeks to learn whether she got £418.46 or something else.

Why it is slow

It is tempting to blame the post. The post is part of it, but the larger delay is the paper itself. The cheque has to be physically routed to the bank that holds the account, checked against that account, and the answer has to come back the same slow way. Currency conversion adds another handoff when the two sides do not share a currency.

Domestic cheques can be sped up because banks agree on how to handle them. Between two countries there is no such shared arrangement, so the cheque goes bank to bank by hand. If you want the broader picture of why some payments take minutes and others take weeks, how long international transfers take covers the electronic side.

The bounce that arrives months later

This is the part people get wrong.

Seeing the money in your account does not mean the cheque has cleared. Under negotiation, the bank has lent you the funds, and it can reverse them if the cheque comes back unpaid. The US Federal Trade Commission makes the same point about cheques in general: even if the funds appear in your account, that doesn’t mean it’s a good cheque, and it can take weeks for a bank to find out that a cheque is fake. By then, any money you sent onward is gone and you may owe the bank.

That is the engine behind overpayment scams. A stranger sends a cheque for more than the agreed price and asks you to send the difference back, by transfer, in cash, in gift cards. The cheque is counterfeit or drawn on a stolen identity. It appears to clear. Your real money leaves. Then the cheque is returned. If you are selling something abroad, the rule is simple: do not accept a payment larger than the price, and never pay money out against a cheque that has not fully cleared. More scam patterns are in sending money safely.

Cheques can also be stopped by the sender, bounce for lack of funds, or be refused if too old. One comparison site says banks may refuse a cheque that is not paid in within six months of its date.

If you are the one sending

A few things are worth thinking about before you post anything.

First, cheques sent through the post can be lost, stolen or altered. A cheque carries your account number and your signature, so a lost one is more than an inconvenience.

Second, the recipient may not be able to use it at all. Not every bank accepts foreign cheques. Comparison sites report that most UK banks no longer take foreign cheques, and those that do may limit them to certain currencies, often through a branch. Some have dropped particular currencies altogether: two UK banks say they no longer accept New Zealand dollar cheques. If you send a cheque to someone who then discovers their bank won’t touch it, the delay is yours too.

Third, you’re giving up the chance to see the cost. A transfer service shows you the rate and fee before you commit. A cheque shows you nothing. For a comparison of what a proper quote looks like, see wire transfer versus online transfer service.

When a cheque might still be reasonable

Fair is fair. Cheques have a few honest uses.

If a payer, such as a government pension office, an insurer or a landlord, only pays by cheque and you have no way to change that, you take the cheque. If the amount is small relative to the fees anyway, you might as well accept the cheque and be patient. And if a cheque is drawn in your own country on a local bank, none of the foreign-cheque problems apply.

Given a choice, though, ask the payer for an electronic transfer to your account. A sender needs your account details, which for most countries means an IBAN and a BIC code or the local equivalent. Fees and rates on the transfer may not be perfect either, but at least they are visible before the money moves.

What to ask your bank before you deposit one

Is this negotiation or collection?
What are all the charges, including any from the overseas bank?
What rate will be used, and when is it fixed?
If it comes back unpaid, how far back can you reverse it?

When the answer to the last question is “years”, treat the funds as provisional until the bank tells you the cheque has been finally paid. Don’t spend what isn’t yours yet.

Rules and fees differ by bank and country, so check with your own bank. This is general information, not financial advice.

Sources

Checked: November 2026