Sending money to Colombia, Brazil and Peru

Here’s a quick test of the marketing. Open any transfer app, type in 200 dollars for Brazil, and see whether it shows you the Brazilian reais that will arrive, or only a fee. The ones that show only a fee are telling you the cheaper half of the story.

Latin America is a crowded market for sending money, and that mostly helps you. But the three countries here behave quite differently, and a habit that works for one can cost you in another.

What the World Bank found, and what it can’t tell you

The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database prices the equivalent of a 200 US dollar transfer. Its latest quarter for these routes was Q3 2025 (fieldwork ran from August into early September), and the US-origin averages came out as follows:

From the US to	Total cost, average	Fee, average	Margin, average
Colombia	4.96%	6.73 USD	1.59%
Brazil	5.63%	5.29 USD	2.98%
Peru	4.65%	8.72 USD	0.29%

Look at Peru. The rate margin is nearly nothing, 0.29%, and yet the corridor’s average cost is close to the other two, because the fee is nearly 9 dollars. In Brazil it’s the other way round: a smaller fee, a margin of almost 3%. Different countries, different places for the money to hide.

What these tables can’t tell you is today’s price. They average whatever the researchers sampled on a few days last August. Use them for shape. For a live comparison, check the page for your corridor and note the quarter shown at the top.

The spread inside each corridor

Averages hide the interesting bit. In Brazil the cheapest listed option for 200 dollars was a bank branch at 1.18% in total, while the dearest were a credit-card route at 12.84% and a cash-agent route at 12.74%. Colombia’s page ran from a negative cost on one cash-pickup service (the rate beat the reference, likely a promotion) up to 17.50% for an online bank-account transfer with a flat 35 dollar fee. In Peru, a cash-agent route came in at 2.00%, while one internet bank-account transfer was 12.50%.

Two lessons. A bank isn’t always the bad guy: in Brazil a bank branch sat at the cheap end. And paying by credit card tends to push the cost up, as the top of the Brazil list and the Peru 500 dollar tab both show. When in doubt, fund with a bank account or debit card, and test.

Putting reais on the three Brazil figures

A hypothetical sender wants 200 dollars to land in a Brazilian account. Take a mid-market rate of 5.50 reais per dollar (illustrative, not a current rate; the live figure is on our USD to BRL page, refreshed hourly). Ideal result: 1,100 reais.

Cheap end, using the World Bank’s low figure of 2.36 dollars total cost: (200 minus 2.36) times 5.50 gives 1,087.02 reais.
Corridor average, 11.24 dollars: 1,038.18 reais.
Expensive end, 25.67 dollars: 958.81 reais.

From cheapest to dearest, the spread is 128 reais, roughly 23 dollars, on a 200 dollar send. Do that every month for a year and the average route costs about 135 dollars, against about 28 on the cheap one. The arithmetic is dull. The saving isn’t.

Brazil: where Pix fits in

Pix is Brazil’s instant-payment system, built by the central bank, Banco Central do Brasil. According to one payments trade publication, it launched in November 2020, runs around the clock including holidays, settles in seconds, and lets people receive money through a key such as a phone number or tax ID instead of a full account number. Person-to-person transfers are free. By the publication’s count it had 148 million users in 2025.

Does that help a sender abroad? Indirectly. Pix is a domestic system, so your dollars don’t “go through Pix” from the US on their own. Some transfer firms advertise payout to a Pix key at the Brazilian end, which can mean quick delivery to a phone-linked account. Ask your provider whether it pays out this way and what the recipient needs, because the free Pix leg doesn’t make the rest of the trip free.

The real has a record of sharp moves, so verify the live rate and be wary of any quote that’s more than a few hours old. Brazil also taxes some foreign-exchange transactions; ask your provider whether anything applies to your transfer.

Colombia: a peso that got stronger

Colombia receives a lot of money from abroad. Figures reported from the Banco de la República put remittances in 2025 at more than 13.098 billion dollars, up 10.6% on 2024’s 11.848 billion. Both the United States and Spain are described as key sending markets.

Here’s the catch for senders. We could not verify a current peso level against the central bank, but when the peso strengthens against the dollar, the same 200 dollars buys fewer pesos than it used to, through no fault of the provider. Your recipient may feel that squeeze before they ever notice a fee. The USD to COP page shows the current rate if you want to see where today sits against your last transfer.

Don’t mistake a strong peso for a permanently strong one. Nobody knows where it goes next.

Peru: the quiet currency, the loud fee

Data from the Banco Central de Reserva del Perú, as reported by Forbes Peru, show remittances of 5,368 million dollars in 2025, up 11.7%, with the United States still the main source. The sol has long been one of the steadier currencies in the region, so there is usually little drama in the rate.

That’s why the Peru table is so fee-driven. One plausible reading: when a currency barely moves, there’s less room to hide money in the rate, so firms charge upfront. Check the fee at your sending amount. In the World Bank’s 500 dollar tier, the cheapest listed option cost 1.00% (4.99 dollars), while one credit-card service came to 24.88 dollars, close to 5%. That gap is about 20 dollars of the same money.

Sending from Europe

We could not get a clean World Bank reading for Europe to Colombia or Brazil, so we won’t print an average for them. For Spain to Peru, the Q3 2025 page (data collected in August) shows an average total cost of about 3.63% for the euro equivalent of 200 dollars, falling to about 2.24% for the equivalent of 500 dollars. The range between firms was wide even so: from about 1.68% to 9.53% for the smaller amount.

One takeaway holds across both continents: bigger transfers dilute a flat fee. If you can combine two small sends into one, do. If you can’t, check whether the provider charges a flat or percentage fee, because the answer changes which amount is cheaper.

Before you hit send

Compare the received amount in local currency, not the fee. Use debit or bank funding unless a credit card is genuinely cheaper in the quote. Check the provider’s licence with your national or state regulator. Ask the recipient how they want to collect, and whether their bank adds its own charge on arrival. If the quote feels rushed, take longer.

Prices and rules change. This is general information, not financial, legal or tax advice, so confirm details with your provider and an adviser if the sums are large.

Sources

Checked: November 2026