Wise vs Payoneer vs the Card Processors
Disclosure: Wise and Payoneer pay us nothing and we have applied to neither. Full disclosure.
Twice on this site we wrote that failing to cost Wise and Payoneer was the biggest hole in our work, and that the structure of what they do suggested our numbers were not the floor. That was right. Receiving the same overseas invoice costs 0.46% through Wise and 5.81% through Stripe Invoicing. This page closes the hole.
The answer
Wise, by roughly ten times. $3,000 from abroad costs $13.74 there and $135–$174 on a card.
- ✅Wise charges nothing to receive. Local account details in 9 currencies at $0; you pay only to convert.
- 💰Conversion measured, not quoted: €3,000 → USD cost €13.73 — 0.458%. Wise publishes “from 0.23%”.
- 💳Payoneer is second: free into a local-currency account, 1% otherwise or by EU/UK bank — but its conversion fee is not published where we could read it.
- ⚠️Neither replaces a card. If your client can only pay by card, none of this helps — you are back at 4.5–5.8%.
Jump to: The full comparison What Wise costs What Payoneer costs The catch Which one are you?
The same $3,000, eight ways
| Route | Rate | On $3,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Wise — free receipt + conversion | 0% + 0.458% | $13.74 |
| Payoneer — EU/UK bank or ACH | 1% | $30.00 |
| Payoneer — non-local currency account | 1% (min $1) | $30.00 + conversion |
| Payoneer — client pays by card | up to 3.99% + 49¢ | $120.19 |
| PayPal — overseas card | 4.49% + 49¢ | $135.19 |
| PayPal — its own button | 4.99% + 49¢ | $150.19 |
| Stripe — overseas + conversion | 5.4% + 30¢ | $162.30 |
| Stripe Invoicing — overseas + conversion | 5.8% + 30¢ | $174.30 |
What Wise actually costs
Wise does something structurally different from a payment processor, and that is why the number is different rather than merely lower. It gives you local bank account details in other countries. Your client in Germany does not send you an international payment at all — they make an ordinary domestic transfer to a German account number. The money crosses the border inside Wise.
| What | Fee |
|---|---|
| Account details for 22 currencies | Free |
| Receiving a domestic transfer in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, HUF, NZD, PHP, SGD, USD | Free |
| Receiving a USD wire or SWIFT payment | $6.11 fixed |
| Receiving GBP by SWIFT | 2.16 GBP |
| Receiving EUR by SWIFT | 2.39 EUR |
| Holding 40+ currencies | Free |
| Converting between currencies | From 0.23%, varies by pair |
We did not take “from 0.23%” on trust. We put figures through Wise’s own calculator:
Measured, not quoted.
€3,000 → USD — fee €13.73 = 0.458%
$1,000 → PHP — fee $4.88 = 0.488%
So the real rate for a common pair is roughly double the advertised floor. That still leaves it about ten times cheaper than the best card route.
One more thing separates it from the processors, and it does not appear as a fee anywhere: Wise converts at the mid-market rate. PayPal applies a conversion spread on top of its percentage and does not publish it as a rate. A quoted fee against an unquoted spread is not a like-for-like comparison, and the difference sits in the direction you would expect.
What Payoneer costs
| How the money arrives | Fee |
|---|---|
| From another Payoneer balance | Free |
| Into a receiving account in your local currency | Free |
| Into a receiving account in another currency | 1% (minimum $1.00) |
| Client pays from an EU or UK bank account | 1% |
| Client pays by ACH bank debit (US only) | 1% |
| Client pays by credit card | Up to 3.99% + $0.49 |
| Client pays by PayPal (US only) | Up to 3.99% + $0.49 |
| Marketplaces and integrated platforms | Varies |
Payoneer’s structure is the same idea with a different price: free if the money arrives in the currency you keep, 1% if it does not. Against Wise’s free receipt plus a measured 0.458% conversion, Payoneer’s 1% is roughly twice as expensive on the numbers we could verify — and there is a number we could not.
What we could not read. Payoneer’s currency conversion fee sits in a collapsed section of its fee page that would not open for us. So the $30.00 above is the receiving fee only; if the money arrives in a currency you then convert, the true cost is higher by an amount we cannot state. We are showing Payoneer in its best light and saying so. Its fee page was last updated 1 January 2026.
The catch, and it is a real one
Everything above assumes one thing: your client can make a bank transfer. Wise and Payoneer are not card processors. They do not give your client a “Pay now” button that takes a Visa.
So the honest decision tree is short.
Client can transfer → Wise, at about 0.46%
Client will only use a card → you are back on the 4.5–5.8% page, and Wise cannot help
Client is on a marketplace → Payoneer, because that is what it is built for
Two smaller frictions worth knowing before you switch. A bank transfer is slower than a card — days rather than seconds — and for a client paying at the last minute that matters. And you still need invoicing software: neither of these produces an invoice, so you would pair one with Zoho Invoice or Invoice Ninja, both free, and put the account details on the invoice.
Which one are you?
Which one are you?
🇪🇺 I invoice clients in Europe or the UK
Wise. Give them your EUR or GBP account details, they make a domestic transfer, you pay nothing to receive and about 0.46% to convert. On $3,000 that is $13.74 against $135–$174 on a card.
💳 My clients will only pay by card
Neither of these helps you. Wise and Payoneer are bank rails, not card processors. Go back to the overseas card page, invoice in your own currency to avoid 1%, and accept 4.5%.
🛒 I get paid through marketplaces
Payoneer. That is the case it was built for — many marketplaces pay into Payoneer directly, and from another Payoneer balance it is free. Check what your marketplace charges; that varies and is not Payoneer’s number.
💵 Large invoices, and I can wait a few days
Wise, without hesitation. The saving scales: on $10,000 the gap between 0.458% and 5.81% is $535. Slower money that is 12 times cheaper is usually the right trade above four figures.
🧾 Small invoices from many countries
Check the minimums, not the percentages. Payoneer has a $1 minimum; Wise charges $6.11 if the payment arrives as a USD wire rather than a local transfer. On a $100 invoice those flip the ranking entirely.
What we could not verify
Payoneer’s conversion fee. Not readable from its fee page. Payoneer is therefore shown at its best on this page, and its real cost when a conversion is involved is higher than $30.00 by an unknown amount.
Language and country. Wise served us its Japanese-language pages despite the US path; we confirmed the page stated “Your country: United States” before using any figure, and every number here is from the US fee tables. If you are not in the US, none of it applies — the direction of an international payment changes the price.
Conversion varies by pair. 0.458% is what we measured for EUR→USD at €3,000 and 0.488% for USD→PHP at $1,000. Wise publishes “from 0.23%”. Run your own pair through its calculator before planning around any of these.
Disclosure. Wise and Payoneer pay us nothing. We have no affiliate arrangement with either and have applied to neither — although we noticed while reading that Wise runs an affiliate programme, so this is a page we could in principle have monetised and have not. We do hold unapproved applications with FreshBooks, SimplyBook.me and Square; none appears on this page. Nothing here is an affiliate link.
This page exists because we published, twice, that failing to cost these two was the largest hole on this site. It was. Correcting it makes every card-based recommendation we have published look worse, which is the point of saying it.
The thing that actually decides it
Not Wise against Payoneer. On the numbers we could verify Wise is roughly half the price, but Payoneer’s unread conversion fee means we are not going to declare that finished.
What decides it is a question you can ask a client in one line: can you send a bank transfer?
If yes, receiving $3,000 from another country costs about $14 and you have been paying $135 to $174. If no, none of this reaches you and the honest answer is that overseas card payments cost about 5% and always will.
We spent two weeks costing invoicing tools that charge $60 to $588 a year. This one question is worth more than all of them, on a single invoice.
Related: What an overseas client actually costs you — the card side, now with its gap filled. What card processing actually costs, Stripe vs PayPal and everything we have costed.