Every Big US Bank Sends Foreign Currency for $0
Disclosure: None of the three banks here pays us anything. Wise, which we use as the yardstick, pays us through a marked link on another page; there is no paid link on this one. Full disclosure.
We went looking at Chase for a separate question and found something odd: the wire that costs nothing is the one where the bank converts your money, and the wire where no conversion happens costs $40. That looked like one bank’s quirk. So we read the other two.
The answer
It is not a quirk. All three do it. Foreign currency goes out free at every one of them; dollars cost $30 to $45. And two of the three state in writing that they make money on the exchange.
- 🏦Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo: $0 to wire foreign currency online. Chase attaches a $5,000 minimum; the other two attach no condition at all.
- 💵The same wire in US dollars: $40, $45, $30. Nothing is converted, nothing is waived.
- 💬Two of them say why, unprompted. Bank of America: “we make money from the foreign currency exchange”. Wells Fargo: “Wells Fargo makes money when we convert one currency to another currency for you”.
- ❗None of the three publishes the size of it. We searched all three fee pages for a percentage and found none for wires.
Jump to: What the three charge What two of them say out loud What it costs you What we could not verify Which one are you?
What the three charge
Outgoing international wires, personal accounts, sent online. Every figure below is from the bank’s own published fees, read on 4 October 2026.
| Bank | Foreign currency | US dollars | Exchange rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chase | $0 at $5,000+ $5 below that | $40 | Not published |
| Bank of America | $0 no minimum | $45 | Not published |
| Wells Fargo | $0 no minimum | $30 | Not published |
Read the two middle columns against each other. In every row, the transfer that costs nothing is the one where the bank performs a currency conversion, and the transfer that costs $30 to $45 is the one where it does not.
Three banks, three fee schedules written independently, the same shape in all of them.
Sources. Chase Total Checking fee schedule — $0 in foreign currency online when the amount is $5,000 or more, $5 below that, $40 in US dollars, $50 if a banker sends it. Bank of America wire transfers — “No wire transfer fee” for international in foreign currency, $45 in US dollars, $30 domestic. Wells Fargo consumer fees — $0 international in foreign currency sent digitally, $30 in US dollars, $40 at a branch.
What two of them say out loud
The interesting part is that nobody is hiding anything. Two of the three volunteer the reason on the same page as the fee.
Wells Fargo: “In addition to any applicable fees, Wells Fargo makes money when we convert one currency to another currency for you. The exchange rate used is set by Wells Fargo, includes a markup and may be different than exchange rates you see elsewhere.”
Both sentences are disclosures, and good ones. They name the revenue, they name who sets the rate, and Wells Fargo uses the word markup without being asked. What neither sentence contains is a number.
So the position a reader is left in is specific, and it is not the position of being deceived. You are told there is a markup. You are told it is set by the bank. You are not told how big it is, and you will not find out from the fee schedule, because that is not what a fee schedule is for.
What it costs you
A number you cannot see is still a number, and it can be bounded from the outside. We measured Wise sending $5,000 abroad at $21.43, converting at the mid-market rate — 0.4286% all in, with nothing hidden behind it.
0.43%. At 1% the free wire has cost you $50. At 2% it has cost $100 — against a $45 fee you were trying to avoid, and a $21.43 alternative you could have checked in a browser.
We do not know where any of the three actually sits, and this site does not publish numbers it has not read. What the arithmetic does is turn a vague worry into a question with one unknown in it, which is a better place to stand than “free sounds good”.
It also explains the $45. If a bank earns on the conversion, a dollar wire is the one transfer it earns nothing on, and it is priced accordingly. We are not claiming that is the reason — none of the three says so, and we are not going to invent a motive. It is simply what the two columns do.
What we could not verify
Any of the three markups. No percentage for wire conversion appears on any of the three pages we read. We searched for rate, spread, markup and margin. Wells Fargo prints a 3% figure for debit card purchases abroad, which is a different product and is not the wire markup; we are not using it as a proxy and nor should anyone else.
Business accounts. All three figures above are personal-account schedules. Wells Fargo publishes a separate $25 dollar-wire fee for analysed business accounts, which suggests business pricing differs at the others too. Not costed here.
What the receiving bank takes. Unchanged from the earlier page: still not costed, still the reason sending dollars is not automatically kinder to the person waiting for them.
Whether the three markups are similar to each other. Three banks landing on the same fee structure does not mean they land on the same margin. One of them could be considerably cheaper than the others and you would have no way to tell from the published material.
Disclosure. Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo pay us nothing and we have no arrangement with any of them.
Wise approved our affiliate application on 27 August 2026, and Wise is the yardstick used above, so the comparison flatters a company that pays us. There is no paid link on this page; the one marked paid link on this site sits at the end of our Wise breakdown. Wise has paid us nothing to date.
Two things are worth weighing against that bias. The $21.43 is reproducible by anyone in a browser in under a minute. And the conclusion here is a conditional, not a recommendation: below 0.43% the banks win, and we have no evidence about where they sit. If a reader gets a written rate out of any of the three, send it to us and we will publish it with the date.
Which one are you?
Which one are you?
💼 I pay overseas contractors regularly
Get the rate in writing once, then stop thinking about it. Ask what percentage away from the mid-market rate your bank applies to an outgoing wire. One answer settles every transfer you make after it, and both of the banks quoted above have already admitted the markup exists.
💰 I send large amounts a few times a year
This is where the unknown gets expensive. A markup of 1% on $50,000 is $500, and the fee you compared was $45. At that size, a quoted rate from two places beats any amount of reading.
🏦 I like my bank and want to keep using it
Then send in foreign currency, not dollars. It is free at all three, and the dollar wire does not avoid the conversion — it moves it to your recipient’s bank, at a rate neither of you chose. Free is still the better of the two bank options.
📊 I want the whole picture
The single-bank version of this, with PayPal costed alongside, is here, and eighteen routes for being paid are in the calculator. Everything on this site is one question: where does the money go between their account and yours.
The thing worth remembering
A fee is a number you can compare. A markup is a number you have to ask for. Three banks have arranged their pricing so that the cheapest-looking option is the one priced the second way, and two of them told us so in writing without being asked.
That is not a scandal, and we are not presenting it as one. It is a reason to ask one question before the next transfer, and to be unsurprised by the answer.