Sending money from the US to Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia

Pull up the World Bank’s table for sending 200 dollars from the US to Thailand and you’ll find a 0.76% option and a 25.00% option, in the same quarter, for the same job. That is a thirty-three-fold gap. Nothing about the Thai baht, the distance or the recipient explains it. The price depends almost entirely on which door you walk through.

That’s the thread through this guide. Four countries in Southeast Asia, four different receiving sides, and one sender problem: the advertised price and the delivered price are two different numbers.

Four corridors, three tables of data

The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database tracks what it costs to send the equivalent of 200 US dollars. Here are the US corridor averages for the third quarter of 2025, with data collected in August of that year (Malaysia is missing, for reasons given below):

US to (Q3 2025)	Average total cost	Average fee	Average rate margin
Vietnam	5.27%	8.17 USD	1.18%
Thailand	7.48%	11.97 USD	1.49%
Indonesia	5.71%	7.10 USD	2.16%

Notice what’s odd. In all three, the average fee is the larger part of the average cost. The rate margin is smallest in Vietnam and biggest in Indonesia, where it runs above 2%. Either way, a headline fee tells you only half of it.

These are averages of whatever providers the researchers sampled on a few days in August 2025. Treat them as a map of the terrain, not a quote. Open the World Bank pages for your corridor and read the quarter printed at the top before quoting anyone a number, including us.

Where the spread comes from

On the Thailand page, three of the cheapest listed options were non-bank money transfer operators sending to a bank account online, at 0.76%, 1.56% and 1.71% total cost. The three most expensive were all bank services: a bank branch at 25.00% ($50 on a $200 send), then a branch route and a call-centre route from another bank, both at 22.50%. Bank-run services crowd the expensive end of that table.

Indonesia shows the same pattern: its most expensive listing was an online bank-account transfer from one big bank, at 17.50%. At the bottom, one debit-card cash-pickup option showed a negative cost of -0.53%, meaning the rate beat the benchmark and the fee was nil. Odd, probably promotional, and not something to plan a monthly budget around.

Why would anyone pay 17.5%? Mostly habit and trust. The bank is the one you already have. It sends the money and doesn’t ask you to download anything. That convenience has a price, and in these tables it’s high.

A worked example (illustrative numbers)

Say a made-up sender wants to put 600 dollars into a Vietnamese bank account before the Lunar New Year. We’ll use the corridor’s average fee of 8.17 dollars and 1.18% margin, and assume, for illustration only, that the fee stays flat at that size. Suppose the true mid-market rate is 25,800 dong per dollar (the live figure sits on our USD to VND page; rates refreshed hourly).

At mid-market, 600 dollars would be 15,480,000 dong. With the average route, the total cost is 8.17 plus 1.18% of 600, which is 7.08, so 15.25 dollars. That leaves about 15,086,550 dong arriving, roughly 393,000 short of the ideal, a cost of 2.54%.

Now suppose the sender uses a route with a flat 35 dollar wire fee and the same margin (also illustrative). Total cost 42.08 dollars, and 14,394,336 dong arrive. That’s about 692,000 dong, or around 27 dollars, less than on the average route, for the same transfer.

Two things to learn from the sums. First, flat fees punish small sends. On 200 dollars, the average Vietnam fee is over 4%; on 600 it falls well under 2%. Sending one bigger transfer instead of three small ones can cut the percentage. Second, even a decent corridor can swallow the sort of money people save for months to send.

Vietnam: a managed dong and a seasonal rush

Vietnam’s State Bank sets a daily reference rate and lets the dong trade within a band around it. The band was widened from plus or minus 3% to plus or minus 5% with effect from 17 October 2022. That makes the dong a managed currency: it moves, but within a corridor the central bank is trying to keep orderly. We have not printed a dong rate here, since it would be stale quickly.

Remittances are a big deal there. A State Bank regional office (Region 2, in Ho Chi Minh City) estimated, as reported by Hanoi Times, that 2025 inflows exceeded the 16 billion dollars recorded in 2024, with Ho Chi Minh City taking around 60% of the national total. Inflows typically peak in the fourth quarter, around New Year and Tet. Tet 2027 starts on 6 February, and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has backed a holiday running 4 to 10 February, though that was a proposal when we checked. In practice: send early. Public holidays can slow payouts, and no one benefits from a deadline.

Thailand: the bank-branch trap

You’ll see PromptPay mentioned in this context. The inbound PromptPay International service one Thai bank describes connects through Singapore banks, so don’t assume it applies to a US sender. For dollars from the US, the practical question is which provider you use to reach a Thai bank account, and the table shows that online route spanning 0.76% to 17.50% depending on who runs it. See USD to THB for the benchmark to compare against.

Indonesia and Malaysia

Indonesia: the rupiah under pressure

Here the pressure is on the currency itself. Bank Indonesia held its policy rate at 5.75% at its October 2026 meeting, with press coverage describing pressure on the rupiah and the bank’s efforts to support it. Check the central bank’s own pages for the current position if the amounts are large.

For a sender, a weaker rupiah means each dollar buys more of it, which feels like a win. It also means quotes move, so get your number on the day you send, not the day you think about it.

Malaysia: the odd one out

Malaysia is the odd one out because we have no verified World Bank average for it: the page for this corridor could not be retrieved when we checked. When a currency firms against the dollar, the dollars you send buy fewer ringgit than before, and the receiving family feels that before the fee even comes up. Compare quotes against USD to MYR and calculate your own leak.

What differs on the receiving side

Same dollars, four different arrivals. In Vietnam, the dong sits in a central-bank band and the biggest inflows cluster before Tet, so timing is about the calendar as much as the rate. In Thailand, the headline risk isn’t the baht, it’s choosing a bank branch over an online account route. In Indonesia, the rupiah has been the moving part, and a quote that’s good in the morning may not be by the afternoon. In Malaysia, any firming of the ringgit quietly shrinks what each dollar delivers.

So ask the recipient three things before you pick a route: which bank or wallet they actually use, whether they want local currency or are able to hold dollars, and what happens if the payout fails. A rejected payment can mean days of waiting and a refund that may come back at a different rate than the one you left with.

Before you press send

Ask for the amount received in local currency, then divide by the mid-market rate.
Check the fee at your actual amount; a flat fee that looks fine at 1,000 dollars hurts at 100.
Where the provider offers it, compare funding by bank account, debit card and credit card; the price can differ for the same firm.
Check the provider’s licensing with your state regulator, and be wary of anyone who pushes you to hurry.
Give the recipient the exact account name and number, and ask them to confirm arrival.

No part of this is a recommendation of a company. Prices change by the week. Check the current terms with your provider, and ask a tax adviser about anything over reporting thresholds.

Sources

Checked: November 2026