Sending money home from Germany: where the law protects you, and where it stops

The border that decides your rights is not the one you think

Most people sending money home compare providers. The more useful comparison is geographic, and German payment law draws it in a place that surprises almost everyone: the European Economic Area — the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Not SEPA, which is a scheme several non-EEA countries take part in. Not the EU alone, which is narrower still for the price rules. The EEA line is what §§ 675d, 675q, 675s and 675e BGB actually key on.

§ 675d (6) sentence 1 no. 1 letter b describes the case that matters: a payment where several providers are involved and at least one of them sits outside the EEA. That is every transfer to India, the Philippines, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Türkiye, Nigeria or Ukraine. It is also, and this catches people out, every transfer to Switzerland or the United Kingdom, both of which are outside the EEA whatever their banking arrangements otherwise look like.

Once a payment falls into that category, the law does not merely fall silent. It names the protections and turns them off. That is worth understanding before comparing exchange rates, because it changes what a bad outcome looks like and who carries it.

Why your family sometimes receives less than you sent

§ 675q (1) BGB says the payer's provider and every intermediary involved must pass the payment amount on undiminished. Paragraph 2 lets the recipient's provider deduct its own charges only if it agreed that with the recipient, and then it has to show the full amount and the charges separately. Paragraph 3 sets the familiar split — each side pays its own provider's charges — and it does so with an explicit condition: only where both providers are located inside the EEA.

Paragraph 4 is the sentence nobody quotes. In the cross-border case just described, § 675q (1) does not apply — not even to the parts of the payment carried out inside the EEA — and the parties may depart from paragraph 2. In plain terms: on the way to a bank outside the EEA, a correspondent bank in the chain may lawfully take its fee out of the money in transit, and nothing in German law requires the amount to arrive whole.

This is the mechanical explanation for an experience many people have had and blamed on the exchange rate: the sum credited at home is short by an amount that appears in no price list you were shown. The exchange rate may also have moved. But the deduction in transit is a separate thing, it is legal, and it happens after you have already agreed the price.

No deadline, and no refund claim if it fails

Inside the EEA, § 675s (1) BGB gives the transfer a deadline: the amount has to reach the recipient's provider by the end of the business day following receipt of your payment order. For payments inside the EEA in a currency other than the euro, up to four business days may be agreed.

For a transfer outside the EEA there is no statutory maximum execution time at all — § 675s (3) disapplies the deadline even for the European leg. The disclosure rules follow the same logic. § 675d (6) sentence 2 removes precisely three information duties: the maximum execution time in the framework contract, before a single payment, and in the pre-contractual information. What you are still owed is the money side. Art. 248 § 13 (1) no. 3 and no. 4 EGBGB keep the duty to tell you all charges, broken down where applicable, and the actual or reference exchange rate before you commit. So a provider may lawfully decline to promise you a date. It may not lawfully leave you guessing about the rate.

The harder loss is § 675y (1) BGB. Inside the EEA, if a transfer is not executed or is executed defectively, you can demand immediate refund of the full amount. § 675e (2) no. 1 lists that provision by number and declares it inapplicable outside the EEA, along with the execution deadline and two related refund rules — and no. 2 then permits departure from the rest of the payment-services rules to your disadvantage. That includes the thirteen-month window in § 676b for reporting an unauthorised or defective payment. Inside the EEA those thirteen months are law; outside, they are whatever your contract says.

One right does survive, and it is the one people need most often. § 675e (2) disapplies § 675y paragraphs 1 to 4 — not paragraph 5. Paragraph 5 covers the case where the transfer was carried out exactly as instructed but you gave the wrong account identifier. You lose the refund claim, but you may require your provider to make efforts within its means to recover the money, and the recipient's provider must supply the information needed to do so. If recovery fails, a written request obliges your provider to hand over everything it has so you can pursue the claim yourself. Your provider is allowed to charge a fee for this work. Ask for it in writing, and ask early.

Inside the EU it has quietly become a different product

If you are sending to Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia or Italy — which, by volume, is where most money leaving Germany goes — three changes from Regulation (EU) 2024/886 are now in force and worth using.

Since 9 October 2025, banks in the euro area must offer *sending* instant euro credit transfers, having had to offer receiving them since 9 January 2025. Instant means the funds are available to the recipient within ten seconds; if the payer's bank gets no confirmation within that window, it must immediately restore your account to where it was. Since 9 January 2025, charges for instant transfers may not exceed those for ordinary transfers of a corresponding type, which removed the surcharge that used to make speed a paid extra.

Since 9 October 2025, banks must also verify the payee: before you authorise a transfer, the bank checks the name you typed against the IBAN and warns you if they do not match. Where a bank fails to run that check and the payment goes wrong as a result, it has to refund you without delay. That is a materially better position than the wrong-IBAN rule above, and it exists only on this side of the border.

Two caveats keep this honest. Providers that are payment institutions or e-money institutions rather than banks — which covers a good share of the transfer apps people use — only have to offer instant transfers from 9 April 2027 in the euro area. And banks in Member States outside the euro area work to later dates again: 9 January 2027 for receiving, 9 July 2027 for sending.

The equal-price rule, and the hole in the middle of it

Regulation (EU) 2021/1230 is the reason a euro transfer from Germany to Portugal costs what a domestic transfer costs. Article 3 (1) requires charges for cross-border payments in euro to be the same as for corresponding national payments. Its reach is set by its own definitions: Article 2 defines a cross-border payment as one where the payer's and the payee's providers are located in different Member States. A payment to a bank outside the EU is neither a cross-border nor a national payment in that sense, so the Regulation does not reach it.

Then there is Article 3 (4), one sentence long: paragraphs 1 and 2 do not apply to currency conversion charges. The equal-price rule covers the fee and not the margin. That is why a transfer can be advertised as free and still be expensive, and it is the single most useful thing to know about how these products are priced.

Transparency is split the same way. The rule that a provider must express its conversion charge as a percentage mark-up over the European Central Bank's euro reference rates is Article 4 — and Article 4 applies to card transactions at cash machines and points of sale, not to transfers. For an online transfer, Article 5 requires the estimated conversion charges, the estimated total in your account currency, and the estimated amount the recipient will get in their currency. Useful, but an estimate, and without the one number that would make providers directly comparable. The ECB publishes its reference rates daily and free of charge, so the comparison is available to you even where the law does not require it to be handed over.

What it actually costs, in the only numbers worth quoting

The World Bank tracks this. Its indicator for Germany as a sending country is the average total cost, as a percentage of the amount sent, of sending USD 200, averaged over the remittance service providers listed in its database. For Germany that figure was 3.02 percent in 2023 — the most recent year in the series as of August 2026, with 2024 and 2025 not yet filled in. The trend behind it is the real story: 9.76 percent in 2016, 6.18 in 2017, 4.42 in 2018, 3.79 in 2021, 3.31 in 2022. Sending money out of Germany has become roughly three times cheaper in seven years.

The receiving-country averages for 2023 point the same way for the corridors that matter here: India 1.76 percent, the Philippines 1.67, Serbia 1.94, Türkiye 2.34, Kosovo 3.42, Bosnia and Herzegovina 3.86, Nigeria 4.64. The United Nations target under Sustainable Development Goal 10.c is to bring transaction costs below 3 percent by 2030 and to eliminate corridors costing more than 5 percent, so several of these corridors are already at or under the target on average.

Read those averages carefully, because they are averages across providers, not across customers. They tell you a cheap option exists on your corridor. They tell you nothing about what the provider you happen to use is charging you, and the spread between the cheapest and the dearest provider on a single corridor is wide enough that a 2 percent average is entirely compatible with someone paying 8. The number is a benchmark to hold your provider against, not a description of your last transfer.

For scale: the Bundesbank puts personal support payments from residents of Germany to people abroad at 8.5 billion euro in 2025, up from 7.8 billion in 2023. Europe accounts for 5.8 billion of that, Türkiye alone for 901 million, Romania 709 million, Ukraine 635 million, Poland 586 million, India 227 million, the Philippines 39 million. These are balance-of-payments estimates of support payments, not a count of individual transfers, but the ranking is stable enough to be worth knowing: the money leaving Germany overwhelmingly stays in Europe.

Identity checks, and the point at which they start

§ 10 (3) no. 2 GwG sets the thresholds for transactions outside an existing business relationship. For a money transfer the figure is 1,000 euro, against 15,000 euro for other one-off transactions and 1,000 euro for crypto-asset transfers. So a walk-in transfer of 1,200 euro triggers full identification, while the same amount from an account you already hold sits inside your existing relationship and its checks.

There is nothing to be avoided here, and trying to avoid it is the mistake. Splitting one transfer into several smaller ones to stay under a threshold is the pattern anti-money-laundering systems are specifically built to detect, and it turns an ordinary payment to your family into something a compliance team has to look at. Send the amount you mean to send, and keep evidence of where the money came from — a payslip is usually the whole answer.

Carrying cash instead: the ten thousand euro line

Two different duties apply, and they are often reported as one. Crossing the external border of the EU — a flight to India, the Philippines, Kosovo or Bosnia — carries an active declaration duty for cash of 10,000 euro or more under Article 3 of Regulation (EU) 2018/1672, the obligation § 12a (7) ZollVG refers to. Travelling within the EU, § 12a (1) ZollVG applies instead: from 10,000 euro you must state the type, number and value of the funds, plus their origin, the beneficial owner and the intended use, on request by customs officers. Active declaration at the external border, disclosure on demand inside.

The threshold counts the total, cash and equivalent instruments together, and it is per person. If the answer to where the money came from is not immediately documented, customs may seize the funds for up to 30 days, extendable once by a court to 90. Carrying cash is legal, common and sometimes sensible. Carrying it undeclared is where the trouble starts.

Is the money taxed? Usually not, and the reason is worth knowing

Two provisions decide this, and the first one catches people out. Under § 2 (1) no. 1 letter a ErbStG, anyone with a residence or habitual abode in Germany is an *Inländer* for gift tax — nationality is irrelevant. So German gift tax law looks at the whole transfer, wherever the recipient lives and whatever passport you hold. People assume that sending money out of the country puts it out of reach of the German tax system. It does not.

The second provision is why this rarely matters in practice. § 13 (1) no. 12 ErbStG exempts gifts between living persons made for the appropriate maintenance or the education of the recipient. Regular support for parents, a spouse or a sibling — rent, food, medical costs, school fees — is the case that provision was written for.

Where it can matter is the lump sum: funding a house, a wedding, a business. That is a gift, not maintenance, and gifts run against the allowances in § 16 ErbStG, which are counted per donor and recipient over ten years under § 14 (1). The allowance most relevant here is small. Parents receiving a gift fall into tax class II — class I covers them only on inheritance — and siblings do too, which puts both at a 20,000 euro allowance over ten years. Spouses have 500,000 and children 400,000.

That is the framework, not advice about your situation. Whether a particular payment counts as maintenance or as a gift, and what any double taxation agreement with your home country does to the result, is a question for a Steuerberater — and specifically for a Steuerberater rather than a Lohnsteuerhilfeverein, whose remit does not extend to gift tax. We coach and place people, we do not advise on tax, and no honest guide can do that job for you.

Check that the provider is allowed to do this at all

Money remittance is a regulated payment service in Germany. Operating it without authorisation under § 10 (1) sentence 1 ZAG or registration under § 34 (1) sentence 1 is a criminal offence carrying up to five years' imprisonment or a fine under § 63 (1) no. 4 ZAG; negligence is covered too. The criminal liability falls on the operator, not on you as a customer.

The practical consequence for you is different and quieter. With an unauthorised operator there is no supervised institution behind the transfer, no complaints body, and none of the statutory machinery described above — which was already thin outside the EEA and is now absent. If the money vanishes, there is nobody to make a claim against. Informal channels are often cheaper and faster precisely because none of that apparatus is being paid for.

Checking takes a minute. BaFin runs a public company database covering institutions authorised, registered or notified in Germany; look the provider up by name before the first transfer rather than after a problem. If something later goes wrong with an authorised provider and the complaint goes nowhere, the Deutsche Bundesbank runs a conciliation body for consumer disputes with financial institutions. Our own placement service is free for candidates because employers pay for it, but nobody — us included — can substitute for a supervised provider on the other end of a transfer.

The honest recommendation

Compare the amount that arrives in the recipient's currency, and nothing else. Ask each provider for one figure: how many rupees, pesos or euro will be credited to that account for the exact amount you intend to send today. That single number silently contains the fee, the exchange-rate margin and the provider's estimate of what gets deducted along the way, and it is the only figure that is comparable across providers. A quoted fee is not, and a headline rate is not, because Article 3 (4) of the Regulation was drafted to let the margin sit outside the price rule.

Then check that figure against the ECB reference rate for the day, so you can see the margin rather than guess at it. If you are sending inside the EU, take the instant transfer — since January 2025 it cannot cost more than the slow one, and since October 2025 the bank has to check the recipient's name against the IBAN before you authorise it. If you are sending outside the EEA, accept that you are buying a product with far less legal backing, and behave accordingly: verify the account details with the recipient by a second channel, keep the confirmation, and if the money does not arrive, put the recovery request in writing early — that duty to make efforts is the one right that crosses the border with your money.