Free tool
How much did they actually keep?
You billed one number and a different, smaller number landed in your account. Somewhere in between, a middleman — your bank, Wise, PayPal, Payoneer, Stripe — took a cut, some of it as a stated fee and some of it buried in the exchange rate. Put in both numbers and the date it settled, and see the whole cost against the mid-market rate for that day.
Mid-market rates provided by Frankfurter, sourced from the European Central Bank. These are ECB reference rates published on working days — a fair benchmark for what a payment was worth, not a dealing rate you could have transacted at, and not financial advice. Every provider adds something; this tool tells you how much.
Knowing the damage on one payment is useful. Knowing it on all of them is a decision — Billable records what you invoiced and what actually landed, so the gap is never a mystery.
Try Billable freeWhere the money actually goes
A cross-border payment usually loses value in two places. The first is the one you're told about: a wire fee, a transfer fee, a handling or correspondent-bank charge, sometimes a percentage of the amount. The second is quieter — the rate used to convert your money isn't the mid-market rate, it's the mid-market rate with a margin baked in. That margin never appears as a line item, which is exactly why it's easy to miss.
This calculator works backwards from reality. It takes what you billed, what actually landed, and the day it settled, looks up the mid-market rate for that day, and works out the difference between what you should have received and what you did. If you also enter the fee they showed you, it splits the total into the disclosed part and the part hidden in the rate.
Banks, Wise, PayPal, Payoneer — the same maths
It doesn't matter who sat in the middle. A traditional bank tends to charge a flat wire fee plus a wide rate margin. Wise shows an explicit fee and converts close to mid-market. PayPal and Payoneer usually lean the other way — a modest visible fee and a heavier rate spread. Marketplaces and payment processors add their own layer on top. All this tool needs is the number that went in and the number that came out; whatever happened in between shows up in the total.
What counts as a reasonable cut?
As a rough guide on a mid-sized freelance payment: anything inside ±0.3% is effectively mid-market — a daily reference rate simply can't tell that apart from the intraday rate they dealt at — under about 1% all-in is competitive, 1–2% is the everyday cost of moving money across a border, and anything past 3% is worth a hard look at your payment route. On a single small payment a flat fee can dominate the percentage and that's normal — the number to watch is what it costs you across a year of invoices, which is why the result shows you that too.
Weekends, holidays and the rate we compare against
The mid-market benchmark comes from the European Central Bank, which publishes on working days only. If your payment landed on a weekend or a holiday, there's no rate for that calendar day, so the tool falls back to the most recent working day and tells you which date it used. Bear in mind that a provider may also have converted on a different day than the one the money appeared in your account, so treat a small difference as timing rather than skimming.
What to do with the number
One payment tells you little; a pattern tells you plenty. If the same route costs you 3–4% every month, the fix is usually structural — a multi-currency account, a different payout provider, invoicing in your own currency, or asking the client to cover the transfer charge. Track what you invoice against what you're actually paid for a few months and the answer tends to be obvious.
Know what every payment really cost you.
Billable tracks multi-currency invoices and what actually landed, on the same ECB rates — so the gap between billed and banked is a number you can see, not a surprise.
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