The United Nations set two numbers for the cost of sending money across a border: an average below 3 percent, and no corridor above 5 percent, both by 2030. The World Bank tracks 15 corridors out of Canada. In 2025, ten of them were still above 5 percent on the headline measure. Which measure you use, though, changes the answer from ten to two.
Start with the concrete version. On the World Bank’s benchmark transfer of 200 US dollars, the Canada to Guyana corridor cost an average of 8.35 percent in 2025. That is 16.70 dollars taken out of a 200 dollar transfer. The same 200 dollars sent from Canada to Nigeria cost 3.15 percent, or 6.30 dollars. Same sender country, same amount, and a difference of 10.40 dollars depending on where the money lands.
What the target actually says
Sustainable Development Goal target 10.c is more specific than it is usually quoted. The wording, in the UN’s own indicator metadata updated on March 27, 2026, is to “reduce to less than 3 per cent the transaction costs of migrant remittances and eliminate remittance corridors with costs higher than 5 per cent” by 2030. Indicator 10.c.1 measures remittance costs as a proportion of the amount remitted, and the World Bank is the custodian agency.
The underlying database is Remittance Prices Worldwide, which covers 365 country corridors, from 48 sending countries to 105 receiving countries. A corridor’s cost is the total cost of sending 200 US dollars, expressed as a percentage of the amount sent. Providers that do not disclose the exchange rate they apply are excluded from the calculation, which matters, because the exchange rate margin is where a large part of the cost usually sits.
Every corridor the World Bank tracks out of Canada
Fifteen corridors from Canada appear in the data for 2025. The table shows both published measures: the simple average across all providers in the corridor, and the SmaRT average, which covers only the cheapest services that meet a defined set of service requirements.
| Money sent from Canada to | 2025, simple average | 2025, SmaRT average | 2016, simple average |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lebanon | 9.43% | 5.66% | 13.42% |
| Guyana | 8.35% | 4.56% | 10.99% |
| Zimbabwe | 6.57% | 2.48% | 10.45% |
| Vietnam | 6.19% | 5.96% | 7.96% |
| Kenya | 6.00% | 0.86% | 10.27% |
| China | 5.83% | 2.74% | 9.24% |
| Haiti | 5.78% | 4.81% | 9.98% |
| Jamaica | 5.69% | 2.90% | 10.12% |
| Ghana | 5.42% | see note | 9.67% |
| Rwanda | 5.03% | 1.94% | 9.85% |
| Sri Lanka | 4.75% | 2.89% | 6.28% |
| Pakistan | 4.73% | 2.05% | 5.48% |
| India | 4.28% | 1.39% | 8.11% |
| Philippines | 3.55% | 1.21% | 6.22% |
| Nigeria | 3.15% | 3.31% | 4.27% |
The measure decides the verdict
On the simple average, ten of the fifteen corridors sit above the 5 percent ceiling. On the SmaRT average, only two do: Vietnam at 5.96 percent and Lebanon at 5.66 percent. That is the same country, the same year and the same database producing either a widespread failure or a near pass.
The UN metadata is explicit about which reading it intends for the corridor half of the target. It says that to count as eliminated, “it should suffice that in each corridor there are at least 3 services, meeting a defined set of service requirements (including service quality, reach, etc.), for which the average is 5% or less”. In other words, the target is met when a sender who shops around can find three good options under 5 percent, not when the average provider charges less than 5 percent.
That is a defensible way to write a target and it is also the more forgiving one. It means the headline number a sender is most likely to encounter, the plain average, can sit at 8.35 percent while the corridor is formally on track. Both numbers are true. They answer different questions, and only one of them is about what the average person actually pays.
The three corridors closest to this region
Of the fifteen corridors the World Bank tracks out of Canada, exactly three run to Latin America and the Caribbean: Guyana, Haiti and Jamaica. There is no Canada to Mexico corridor in the data, no Canada to Colombia, and no Canada to Brazil. That absence is worth stating plainly, because it means the region’s largest countries are simply not measured from this sending market.
Among the three that are, the trajectories differ. Jamaica has come down furthest, from 10.12 percent in 2016 to 5.69 percent in 2025, a fall of about 44 percent. Haiti went from 9.98 to 5.78 percent over the same period. Guyana has moved least, from 10.99 to 8.35 percent, a fall of about 24 percent, and it did not fall steadily: the corridor was priced at 10.18 percent as recently as 2024, higher than it had been in 2020.
Guyana is also where the two measures diverge most sharply among the three. Its simple average of 8.35 percent sits 3.79 points above its SmaRT average of 4.56 percent, the widest such gap of any corridor from Canada except Kenya’s. A gap that size means the cheap options exist and most of the market is not priced anywhere near them.
Progress has not been a straight line
Counting corridors above 5 percent by year gives a blunter picture of the trend than any single average. In 2018, all fifteen corridors out of Canada were above 5 percent. By 2023 that was down to ten. In 2024 it went back up to thirteen. In 2025 it returned to ten.
Two of the last three years, in other words, moved away from the target rather than toward it. With four years left on a 2030 deadline, the direction of travel on this particular sending market is better described as uneven than as steady improvement.
What we could not check
The SmaRT figure published for the Canada to Ghana corridor in 2025 is negative, at minus 2.30 percent. A negative total cost is not something the World Bank’s published indicator metadata explains in the material we were able to retrieve, and we are not going to guess at a mechanism, so that cell is marked “see note” in the table above and Ghana is left out of the SmaRT comparisons. Every other figure in the table is reproduced as published.
We also could not retrieve the most recent quarterly Remittance Prices Worldwide report directly. The World Bank’s file server returned an HTTP 403 to automated requests, which is a bot filter rather than a missing document. The annual series used throughout this article comes from the UN’s SDG database, which publishes the same indicator through 2025 and is the custodian’s own channel.
Frequently asked questions
What does the UN target for remittance costs actually say?
Target 10.c commits countries to reduce transaction costs of migrant remittances to less than 3 percent and to eliminate corridors costing more than 5 percent, both by 2030. Indicator 10.c.1 measures the cost as a proportion of the amount remitted, and the World Bank is the custodian agency.
Which corridor out of Canada is the most expensive?
Of the fifteen tracked in 2025, Lebanon at 9.43 percent, followed by Guyana at 8.35 percent. On a 200 US dollar transfer, the Guyana figure is 16.70 dollars.
Why do two different figures get published for the same corridor?
The simple average covers every provider in the corridor. The SmaRT average covers only the cheapest services meeting a set of service requirements. In 2025 the two measures put either ten or two of Canada’s fifteen corridors above the 5 percent ceiling, depending on which is used.
Are Canada to Mexico or Canada to Brazil corridors tracked?
No. The Remittance Prices Worldwide database covers 365 corridors overall, but the fifteen that run from Canada reach only Guyana, Haiti and Jamaica in Latin America and the Caribbean. Mexico, Colombia and Brazil are not measured from Canada.
Have costs from Canada been falling?
Unevenly. The number of tracked corridors above 5 percent fell from fifteen in 2018 to ten in 2023, rose to thirteen in 2024, and returned to ten in 2025.
Sources and method
From the sources. All corridor figures come from the United Nations SDG indicators database, series SI_RMT_COST_BC (average cost of sending 200 US dollars in a corridor) and SI_RMT_COST_SC (the SmaRT average for the same corridor), retrieved through the UN SDG API for Canada as the sending country. The wording of target 10.c, the definition of indicator 10.c.1, the three services test for the 5 percent component, and the coverage of 365 corridors from 48 sending to 105 receiving countries all come from the UN SDG indicator metadata for 10.c.1, last updated March 27, 2026. The exclusion of providers that do not disclose their exchange rate, and the definition of the cost as the total cost of sending 200 US dollars, come from the World Bank’s metadata for the remittance cost indicator and from Remittance Prices Worldwide.
Our own analysis. The count of corridors above 5 percent, in 2025 and in each earlier year, is ours, made by applying the target’s own threshold to the published corridor values. The dollar conversions (16.70 dollars on Guyana, 6.30 dollars on Nigeria) are the published percentages applied to the database’s own 200 dollar benchmark. The percentage changes since 2016, the gap between the simple and SmaRT measures for each corridor, and the observation that only three of Canada’s fifteen tracked corridors reach Latin America and the Caribbean are also ours.
One conflict, declared. The World Bank’s World Development Indicators series for the average cost of sending from Canada gives materially lower values than the UN’s sending country series for the same years, 2.97 percent against 5.96 percent for 2023 for example, despite similar published definitions. We could not reconcile the two from the documentation available, so this article does not use either sending country average. It uses the corridor level series only, where both the simple and SmaRT measures are published side by side and the comparison is like for like.
Related Raw POV coverage: the stopover programmes on the way to South America, how three regions price a delayed flight, and Latin American communities in Canada.
