Landing your first overseas client feels like a promotion. A bigger market, better rates, a name your local competitors can’t claim. Then the payment arrives and the number in your account isn’t the number on your invoice — it’s ten, twenty, sometimes eighty units short, with no explanation attached.
Nobody stole from you. The money passed through three or four hands on the way, and each one took a little. The problem is that almost none of it appears on a statement labelled “fee”.
Here’s where it actually goes, and how to keep more of it.
Agree the currency before you agree the price
The first decision on an international engagement isn’t your rate. It’s which currency the rate is denominated in — because that single choice decides who carries the exchange risk for the length of the relationship.
Bill in your currency and the client bears the risk: they send whatever it costs them that month to buy your invoice amount. Bill in theirs and you carry it. A retainer agreed at $3,000 a month is not a fixed income if you spend in rupees, pounds or euros — it’s a variable one that moves with a market you don’t control. Over a year, a 5% swing on a monthly retainer is most of a month’s fee.
Neither option is automatically right. Billing in the client’s currency is often what wins you the work, particularly with clients who’ve never paid a foreign supplier before. Just don’t do it by accident, and don’t do it without knowing which way the risk now points.
Two things make it manageable:
- Say the currency out loud, in the contract and on every invoice. Not ”$” — USD. There are at least six currencies with a dollar sign and no amount of context makes a Canadian client read ”$” as United States dollars.
- Revisit long engagements. A rate set two years ago in a currency that has since moved 10% against yours is a pay cut you agreed to without noticing.
The three places the money disappears
An international transfer usually loses money in three distinct ways. Most freelancers only ever see the first.
The sending fee. Your client’s bank charges them a flat fee to send. This one is visible, it’s theirs, and it’s rarely the problem.
Intermediary bank charges. A traditional bank wire often doesn’t go directly from their bank to yours. It hops through one or two correspondent banks that hold the relationship between the two countries, and each hop can deduct a handling charge from the money in transit — commonly in the region of $15–30 a time. You never agreed to this and never see an invoice for it. You just receive less than was sent.
This is what the fee instruction on a wire controls. OUR means the sender pays all charges and you receive the full amount. SHA (shared) means they pay their side and you absorb the deductions along the way. BEN means you pay everything. Most clients leave it on the default, which is usually SHA. Ask for OUR on large invoices, and expect to negotiate.
The exchange-rate markup. This is the big one, and it’s invisible by design. When your money is converted, it is not converted at the mid-market rate — the real rate you’d see on a search engine. It’s converted at that rate plus a margin, and the margin is the fee. Traditional banks commonly take somewhere around 2–4%. Some payment platforms take 3–4% and describe the transfer itself as free, which is true and irrelevant. Specialist transfer services generally take well under 1% and show you the markup explicitly.
On a $2,000 invoice, the difference between a 0.5% margin and a 3.5% margin is $60. On $2,000 a month, it’s $720 a year — a decent laptop, lost to a number nobody quoted you.
Choose the rail, don’t inherit it
Left to themselves, most clients will pay you however is easiest for them, which is rarely cheapest for you. Decide first, then tell them.
- Bank wire (SWIFT). Universally accepted, slow (2–5 working days), exposed to intermediary charges, and usually the worst exchange rate. Fine for large invoices where a flat fee is a small percentage; poor for small ones.
- Specialist transfer services. Near mid-market rates and transparent fees. Many give you local receiving details — an account number in your client’s own country — so the payment is a cheap domestic transfer for them and arrives as a normal transfer for you. This is the sweet spot for most freelancers.
- Card and checkout platforms. Effortless for the client, and priced accordingly: a percentage of every payment plus a currency conversion margin on top. Worth it when the convenience is what closes the deal, or for small recurring amounts.
- Consumer payment apps. Convenient, widely trusted, and typically among the most expensive once the conversion margin is counted. Read the actual rate you’re offered, not the fee.
The honest comparison isn’t the advertised fee. It’s the amount that lands in your account, on the same invoice, on the same day — the only figure that matters.
Put payment details on the invoice properly
An international payment fails or stalls for boring reasons: a missing intermediary bank, a name that doesn’t match the account, a currency nobody stated. Every avoidable delay is you, chasing.
An invoice going abroad should carry your full legal name exactly as the bank holds it, your business address, the account details in the right format for the destination (IBAN and BIC/SWIFT for most of Europe, routing and account numbers for the US, whatever your country uses), the intermediary bank details if yours requires them, your tax registration number if you have one, and the currency stated in letters next to every figure. If your country requires a purpose-of-payment code, put it on the invoice rather than making the client’s bank guess.
If you’re building these by hand, our free invoice generator produces a clean PDF with room for all of it, no signup required.
Price the friction in
None of the above is free, so it belongs in your rate rather than in your disappointment. If roughly 2% of your income evaporates in conversion and charges, and a third of your clients are overseas, that’s a real cost of doing business — the same as your accountant or your software.
The freelance rate calculator has a line for business expenses and a buffer percentage; international payment costs belong in one or the other. Guessing at it once a year beats absorbing it silently every month.
Record it at the rate on the day it landed
Here’s the part that quietly corrupts a lot of freelance bookkeeping.
When a foreign payment arrives, it is worth what it was worth on the day it arrived — not what the rate is today, and not what it was on the day you sent the invoice. Those three numbers are all different, and using the wrong one puts your books out by an amount that grows with every foreign invoice you raise.
If you invoiced $2,000 in March and were paid in May, two things happened: you earned $2,000, and the exchange rate moved between those dates. The gap is a foreign exchange gain or loss, and in many countries it’s accounted for separately from the income itself. Even where the treatment is simpler, you still need a defensible rate for the day the money landed — the one your bank statement has to reconcile against.
The rate you want is the published reference rate for that date. Our historical currency converter gives you exactly that: pick the pair, the amount and the date the payment settled, and it returns the European Central Bank reference rate for that day. Where the payment landed on a weekend or a public holiday, no rate was published, so it falls back to the most recent working day and tells you which one it used — so the number in your ledger is always attributable to a source.
Ask your accountant these questions, once
Cross-border income attracts paperwork that domestic income doesn’t, and it varies enormously by where you live and where your client is. It’s worth one focused conversation early rather than a scramble at year end.
This is general guidance, not tax or legal advice. Rules for cross-border income, withholding and indirect tax vary by country and change regularly — confirm your own position with a local accountant.
The questions worth asking: does exported service income attract sales tax, VAT or GST in my country, or is it zero-rated — and does that depend on paperwork I have to file in advance? What proof of foreign inward remittance do I need to keep, and does my bank issue it automatically or on request? Might my client’s country withhold tax at source, and is there a treaty that reduces it if I supply a residency certificate or a declaration form? How do I report exchange gains and losses?
None of these are hard once answered. All of them are expensive to discover late.
Small habits that get you paid faster
- Invoice the day the work is done, in the client’s business hours if you can. An invoice that arrives at 3am their time reads as less urgent than it is.
- State the due date as a date, not “net 30”. Different countries count differently, and a specific date removes the argument.
- Add three to five working days to your expectations before you start chasing. International transfers are genuinely slow; a payment isn’t late just because it isn’t instant.
- Take a deposit from new overseas clients. It tests the payment route on a small amount before a large one depends on it — and a rail that fails on the deposit is one you’ve discovered cheaply.
- Keep the remittance confirmation. When a payment goes missing mid-hop, the reference number on that confirmation is the only thing that finds it.
Where Billable comes in
Working internationally means the same admin as everyone else, plus a currency question stapled to every transaction. Billable is built for that. Invoice in the currency you agreed, track what you were actually paid rather than what you hoped for, and let the conversion be handled against the same ECB reference rates the converter above uses — so what you see in the app matches your ledger and your bank statement.
The result is a finance view that tells you the truth about international work: what you billed, what actually landed, and what it was worth on the day it did.