Cross-Border Fee Calculator

What each field means, and where the money is taken

The two paths charge you at different moments, and that is most of why they are hard to compare from a fee page. Here is where each line is actually collected.

Traditional path

• Wire fee. A fixed amount your bank keeps when the transfer leaves. Because it does not scale with the amount, it dominates small transfers: the same fee is a large share of $500 and a small share of $5,000. Receiving banks and intermediary banks can add their own fixed fees on the way, which the sender rarely sees in advance.
• FX markup. The gap between the mid-market rate and the rate you are actually given. It almost never appears as a line item; it is inside the rate. On a wire, the bank applies it when it converts. On a card, the network converts at its settlement rate when the purchase clears, a day or more after you tap, and the issuer adds its markup on top. FX, DCC and the cross-border fee traps walks through the layers.
• Card foreign-transaction fee. A percentage the issuer adds because the merchant is abroad. It is charged at clearing and, on many cards, charged whether or not any currency conversion happened, so paying a foreign merchant in your own currency does not avoid it.

Stablecoin path

• On-ramp fee. The cost of turning money into USDT or USDC: the exchange's trading fee plus any spread between the price you pay and the market price. It is paid once, on the full amount, at the moment you buy, even if you then spend the coins over months.
• Network fee. The flat cost of moving the coin from the exchange to the card. It depends on which network you send over, not on how much you send, so it behaves like the wire fee: negligible on a large transfer, noticeable on a small one. Blockchain basics covers why the same coin costs very different amounts to move on different networks.
• Card spend / conversion fee. What the card program keeps for turning coin into spendable balance or into the merchant's currency. Some programs charge it when you top up, some on each purchase, some both. If you will spend in a currency the card does not settle in, the card's own FX markup applies as well; this calculator has no separate field for it, so add it to this percentage.

Where the defaults come from

The prefilled numbers are typical ranges taken from published bank and card fee schedules, not a quote from any one provider, and the four quick scenarios are the same kind of estimate arranged for common situations. The result is exactly as good as the numbers you put in. Before treating the saving as real, replace each default with the figure from your own bank's tariff and your card's fee page. The card comparison lists the top-up and FX fees for the cards it covers, with the month each was checked.

What the calculator cannot tell you

• Where the money ends up. A wire puts cash in someone's bank account. The stablecoin path ends as balance on a card that you spend. If the job is paying a supplier's bank account, the two paths are not the same instrument and the cheaper one may not do the job.
• Speed and certainty. A wire takes days and is hard to reverse; a stablecoin transfer settles in minutes, but a card program can hold or review a balance, and a frozen balance costs more than any fee. The hidden costs of crypto cards covers freeze risk.
• Dispute rights. A card purchase can be disputed through the network; a coin sent to the wrong address cannot. See chargebacks vs crypto.
• The peg. The stablecoin path assumes one coin is worth one dollar throughout. When a coin trades below $1, every dollar of coin you load becomes less than a dollar of balance, and that loss is not in any fee field. Check the depeg monitor before a large top-up, and the depeg history for how often it has happened.
• Fixed costs outside the transaction. Card issuance, subscription tiers, ATM withdrawals and inactivity fees sit outside a per-payment model. They matter if you make few payments.
• Tax. In some jurisdictions buying and spending a stablecoin is a reportable event. Nothing here models that.

Common mistakes

• Counting the FX markup twice. If your card advertises the interbank rate, set its markup to zero, but keep the foreign-transaction fee if the card charges one. They are separate charges, and a card can have none of the first and all of the second.
• Treating "zero fee" as zero cost. A provider with no fee line and a rate a few percent off mid-market has charged you the same money in a different place. Enter the rate gap as the markup.
• Modelling one large transfer when you actually make many small ones. Fixed fees decide the small-amount case. Run the calculator at the size you really send.
• Accepting the terminal's offer to pay in your home currency. That is dynamic currency conversion, and it moves the exchange rate from the network to the merchant's provider at a rate you cannot model here. Choose the local currency and let the card convert.

How to check the result against your own statements

For the traditional path, take a past foreign purchase. Divide the amount on your statement by the amount on the receipt: that is your all-in exchange rate. Compare it with the mid-market rate on the day the purchase cleared, usually a day or two after you paid. The percentage gap is your FX markup and foreign-transaction fee combined, and it is the number to enter above.

For the stablecoin path, the three fees are on three different receipts. The exchange's order history shows what you paid per coin against the market price at the time (the on-ramp). The withdrawal record shows the network fee. The card app shows how much balance a given amount of coin became (the conversion fee). How topping up a card with stablecoins works shows where to find that last figure. With those three real numbers in the fields, the comparison stops being an estimate.