NZ Bank International Transfer Fees Compared

What it actually costs to send money overseas from a New Zealand bank

Four of New Zealand's five major banks now advertise a $0 international transfer fee when you send online. That sounds like the problem has been solved. It has not. On a NZ$5,000 transfer to the United States, third-party comparison data puts BNZ's total cost at NZ$77.46, ASB's at NZ$84.58 and Kiwibank's at NZ$108.39 — against NZ$16.37 through Wise. BNZ's headline transfer fee in that example was zero. Almost the entire NZ$77.46 was the exchange rate.

We earn a commission if you open an account with some of the providers listed on this page. It never changes the rate or fee you pay, and it never changes our rankings — our comparison figures come from each provider's published pricing.

The master comparison: NZ$5,000 from New Zealand to the United States

This is the benchmark the rest of the page rests on. All figures are the total cost — the transfer fee plus the money lost to the exchange rate margin — not the advertised fee. Bank rows marked "modelled" are calculated from that bank's own published fee schedule plus the margin band we measured across the banks that appear in the third-party dataset; we say so rather than pretend a measurement exists.

Provider	Total cost on NZ$5,000	As % of transfer	Basis
Wise	NZ$16.37	0.33%	Third-party comparison data
XE Money Transfer	NZ$30.18	0.60%	Third-party comparison data
OFX	NZ$39.02	0.78%	Third-party comparison data
CurrencyFair	NZ$41.56	0.83%	Third-party comparison data
TorFX	NZ$50.51	1.01%	Third-party comparison data
Currencies Direct	NZ$60.73	1.21%	Third-party comparison data
BNZ	NZ$77.46	1.55%	Third-party comparison data
ASB	NZ$84.58	1.69%	Third-party comparison data
ANZ	NZ$75–125 (modelled)	1.5–2.5%	ANZ published fees + measured bank margin band
Westpac	NZ$75–125 (modelled)	1.5–2.5%	Westpac published fees + measured bank margin band
Kiwibank	NZ$108.39	2.17%	Third-party comparison data
PayPal	NZ$226.85	4.54%	Third-party comparison data

ANZ and Westpac are not in that third-party dataset. We are not going to invent a figure for them. What we can do is state their published fees exactly — ANZ charges NZ$0 online and NZ$15 staff-assisted, Westpac charges NZ$0 online for foreign currency and NZ$30 in branch — and note that their exchange rate margins are not disclosed anywhere on either bank's website. Given that the three banks whose all-in cost has been measured sit between 1.55% and 2.17%, and that no NZ bank publishes a margin below that band, treating ANZ and Westpac as costing something similar is a reasonable working assumption. Getting a live quote before you commit is the only way to know.

The two-part cost structure: the fee you see and the margin you don't

Every international transfer has two prices. The first is the transfer fee, which is printed in the fee schedule and easy to compare. The second is the exchange rate margin — the gap between the real mid-market rate and the rate the bank gives you. It is not itemised, it does not appear on your statement as a fee, and on any transfer above about NZ$1,500 it is the larger of the two numbers by a wide margin.

Worked example: NZ$5,000 to US dollars

Suppose the mid-market NZD/USD rate — the rate you see on Google, Reuters or XE's rate charts — is 0.6000. On NZ$5,000 that is exactly US$3,000.

• Your bank offers you 0.5910. That is a 1.5% margin. You receive US$2,955.
• You are US$45 short. At the mid-market rate, US$45 is NZ$75.
• Your transfer fee was NZ$0.
• Your actual cost was NZ$75.

Nothing on your statement will say NZ$75. The statement will say NZ$5,000 sent, no fee. That is the whole trick, and it is why "no transfer fee" advertising has spread across the sector so quickly — the fee was never where the money was.

Run the same arithmetic on a provider quoting 0.25%–0.6% all-in and the gap becomes obvious. This is also why the cost of a bank transfer scales with the amount while the cost of the fee does not. On NZ$500 a NZ$15 branch fee dominates. On NZ$50,000 a 1.8% margin is NZ$900 and the fee is a rounding error.

What each bank charges to send money overseas

Taken from each bank's own published fee schedule. Effective dates: ANZ 24 June 2026, BNZ 31 March 2026, Westpac's online fee removal 1 December 2025.

Bank	Online / app	Branch or phone	Correspondent bank fee
ANZ	NZ$0 (Internet Banking, goMoney)	NZ$15	ANZ covers its correspondent banks' fees; other banks in the chain may still deduct
ASB	NZ$5–15 (FastNet Classic — see note)	NZ$30	Optional "sender to pay": NZ$5 (USD) to NZ$25 (JPY, SGD, HKD, NZD)
BNZ	NZ$0 in foreign currency; NZ$5 if sent in NZD	NZ$25	NZ$0 in foreign currency; NZ$12 if sent in NZD
Westpac	NZ$0 in foreign currency via Westpac One; NZ$5 if sent in NZD	NZ$30	Westpac passes on overseas bank charges above NZ$25
Kiwibank	NZ$10 (shared charges) or NZ$20 (sender pays all)	NZ$25 (shared) or NZ$35 (sender pays all)	Included in the SHA/OUR choice above

Note on ASB. ASB's live fee table on its foreign exchange page renders dynamically and we could not read the values directly. Third-party sources disagree: NZ$5 online has been reported as at late 2025, while older surveys of NZ bank international fees recorded NZ$15. The NZ$30 staff-assisted figure is consistent across all sources. Treat ASB's online fee as NZ$5–15 and confirm it in FastNet Classic before you send. We would rather give you a range than a confident wrong number.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. First, sending in New Zealand dollars costs more than sending in the destination currency at both BNZ and Westpac — NZ$5 plus, at BNZ, a NZ$12 correspondent fee. If you send NZD, someone offshore converts it, and you have no control over the rate they use. Send in the recipient's currency wherever the option exists. Second, several banks waive fees on specific Pacific corridors: ANZ covers correspondent fees to Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, PNG, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, New Caledonia and Timor-Leste; Westpac charges NZ$0 via Westpac One to substantially the same list. For those destinations the banks are genuinely competitive on fees, though the FX margins on Pacific currencies are the widest in the market — commonly quoted at up to 5%.

Receiving money into a New Zealand bank account

This is the fee almost nobody expects. If someone overseas sends money to your New Zealand bank account, your own bank charges you to accept it — usually NZ$10 to NZ$15, deducted from the amount that arrives. On a NZ$400 payment from a family member that is a 3.75% haircut you did not agree to.

Bank	Inward fee, own account	Inward fee, credited elsewhere	Waivers
ANZ	NZ$15	NZ$15 to a non-ANZ NZ account	No fee under NZ$300 equivalent
ASB	NZ$15	NZ$25 to another bank, settled in NZD	Waived on payments of NZ$100 or less
BNZ	NZ$10	NZ$15 to another bank	No BNZ charge if the payment arrives via another NZ bank
Westpac	NZ$15	NZ$15 to a non-Westpac account	No fee below NZ$100; NZ$0 from Westpac Australia
Kiwibank	NZ$12	Not offered	None published

ANZ's NZ$300 threshold is the most generous inward waiver among the five, and it is genuinely useful if you receive small regular payments. Westpac's zero fee on transfers arriving from Westpac Australia is the reason a lot of trans-Tasman families keep both. Beyond that, the inward fee is close to unavoidable at a bank — which is the strongest single argument for a multi-currency account with local receiving details. If you can be paid into local USD, GBP, EUR or AUD account details and convert when you choose, there is no inward wire to charge you for. That is the mechanic behind the Wise Business account for NZ freelancers and exporters, and it applies just as well to personal use.

Online versus in-branch: the same transfer, two prices

Every one of the five banks charges more for a staff-assisted international payment than an online one, and the gap is now larger than it has ever been because the online side went to zero while the counter price did not move.

• ANZ: NZ$0 online, NZ$15 in branch or by phone.
• ASB: NZ$5–15 online, NZ$30 staff-assisted.
• BNZ: NZ$0 online in foreign currency, NZ$25 branch-assisted.
• Westpac: NZ$0 via Westpac One, NZ$30 staff-assisted.
• Kiwibank: NZ$10 online, NZ$25 in branch — and NZ$35 if you also ask Kiwibank to cover all downstream charges.

The margin does not improve at the counter to compensate. You are paying NZ$15 to NZ$30 purely for someone to type the SWIFT details for you. There are two situations where that is money well spent: an unusual currency or destination the online channel will not accept, and a large or irreversible payment — a property deposit, a settlement — where you want a human being who can trace it. For a routine remittance it is a straight loss. If you are new to this, the branch's real value is the first transfer; do the second one yourself.

What "no transfer fee" promotions actually mean

Four banks now advertise $0 or near-$0 online international transfers. Read those offers precisely, because the wording carries a lot of weight:

• It applies to the bank's own fee only. The exchange rate margin is untouched, and the margin is 80–100% of the cost on anything above NZ$1,500.
• It usually applies only to foreign-currency sends. BNZ and Westpac both still charge NZ$5 if you send in New Zealand dollars — and BNZ adds NZ$12 in correspondent fees on NZD sends.
• It applies to the digital channel only. ANZ's own fee page describes its NZ$0 as a current fee offer rather than a permanent price; Westpac's removal, effective 1 December 2025, is framed as applying to the currencies and countries available through Westpac One, with standard fees on other platforms.
• Downstream banks are not covered. ANZ covers its own correspondent network's fees; it cannot cover a third bank's. Intermediary deductions on SWIFT payments commonly run NZ$10–100 and are why a recipient sometimes gets less than the confirmation said.

None of this makes the offers fake. A zero fee is better than a NZ$15 fee. It just means the fee was never the thing to optimise. If you want the full arithmetic on choosing a channel, our guide to sending money overseas from New Zealand works through it corridor by corridor, and the cheapest way to exchange money in New Zealand covers the cash side.

Card fees are a separate problem — and the banks have diverged sharply

The fee your bank charges when you tap a card in a foreign currency is set independently of its transfer pricing, and the spread between NZ banks is now the widest it has been in a decade. These are each bank's own published figures.

Bank	Credit card	Debit card	Overseas ATM (bank's own fee)
ANZ	0% on personal credit cards	1.30%	NZ$0
ASB	2.10% (0% on ASB Visa Flex)	2.10% Visa Debit; 1.10% FastCash	Not separately published
BNZ	2.25%	2.25% (Flexi Debit Visa)	NZ$0
Westpac	1.83% (0% on Fee Free Mastercard)	1.83%	NZ$3
Kiwibank	1.85%	2.50%	NZ$6
Wise card	No foreign transaction fee; conversion from 0.25% at the mid-market rate		Free to NZ$400/month, then 2.69%

Two findings here deserve to be pulled out. ANZ no longer charges a currency conversion charge on personal credit cards at all — a genuine 0%, which makes an ANZ personal credit card one of the better travel spending cards issued in New Zealand, and a rare case of a big bank beating the fintechs on a headline number. And Kiwibank's 1.85% international transaction fee applies to transactions processed offshore even when they are billed in New Zealand dollars, which catches Airbnb, Spotify and similar subscriptions; a Consumer NZ investigation in July 2026 found none of the other major NZ banks had an equivalent charge. Neither of those facts is visible from a transfer-fee comparison, which is why we treat cards separately in our guide to the best card to use overseas from NZ.

Where the banks genuinely win

A comparison that only ever concludes "use a fintech" is not a comparison. The banks hold real advantages, and they are specific:

• Exotic and Pacific currencies. The big five reach 137–230 countries. Wise does not support Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea or the Cook Islands at all. For those corridors your bank is the answer, not a fallback.
• Large transfers with a named contact. On a NZ$400,000 property settlement the ability to phone a relationship manager who can trace a SWIFT message is worth more than 1% of the amount.
• Bank cheques, drafts and documentary credits. Some visa applications, court filings, foreign universities and trade counterparties will only accept these. No digital provider issues them.
• Existing lending relationships. If your mortgage pricing is bundled to a package, moving your FX volume elsewhere occasionally has knock-on effects. Check before you assume it doesn't.
• Forward contracts and hedging at scale. The banks' dealing desks will write structures a retail app will not.
• Same-day certainty within a network. Westpac NZ to Westpac Australia, or an ANZ NZ to ANZ Australia account, often settles internally and fast, with no inward fee.

The digital alternatives, compared honestly

Provider	Transfer fee	Exchange rate	Best suited to
Wise	From 0.25% of the amount, no fixed minimum for most currencies	Mid-market, no markup	Most transfers under NZ$50,000; receiving in 9+ currencies; card spending
XE Money Transfer	No fee on most transfers	Margin built into the rate	Wide currency coverage, rate alerts
OFX	NZ$0 at NZ$10,000 and above; NZ$12 below that	Margin built into the rate	Larger transfers; 24/7 phone dealers
TorFX	No transfer fee	Margin built into the rate	People who want a named dealer and forward contracts
Western Union	Varies by payout method and corridor	Margin built into the rate; wider on cash payout	Cash pickup where the recipient has no bank account

The trade-off between Wise and the margin-based brokers is straightforward. Wise shows you the fee and gives you the real rate, so you can verify what you paid against Google in ten seconds. XE, OFX and TorFX bundle their revenue into the rate, so the only way to compare is to get a live quote from each and check what actually lands. On the measured NZ$5,000 benchmark Wise came out cheapest by a factor of two over the next provider — but OFX and TorFX assign you a human dealer, which some people sending NZ$200,000 rate highly and which Wise does not offer.

Our methodology

So you can check our work and tell us when it goes stale:

1. Fees come from the bank's own published schedule. ANZ Fees and Charges effective 24 June 2026; BNZ Personal Account, Service and Facility Fees effective 31 March 2026; Westpac's Transaction and Service Fees brochure and international service fees page; Kiwibank's foreign exchange rates and fees page and credit card rates and fees page; ASB's foreign exchange, credit card and bank account fee pages.
2. All-in costs on the NZ$5,000 benchmark are third-party comparison data for a NZ-to-US transfer, not our own measurement. We use one benchmark consistently rather than mixing corridors, because total cost varies enormously by currency pair.
3. Implied margins are arithmetic, and we show it. BNZ's NZ$77.46 total minus its NZ$0 online foreign-currency fee leaves NZ$77.46 of margin, or 1.55%. Kiwibank's NZ$108.39 minus its NZ$10 online fee leaves NZ$98.39, or 1.97%. ASB's NZ$84.58 minus a NZ$5–15 fee leaves roughly 1.4–1.6%.
4. Where a bank does not publish a margin, we say so. None of the five publishes one. ANZ and Westpac are absent from the benchmark dataset, so their totals are modelled ranges and labelled as such.
5. Rates move. Every figure here is a snapshot as at 8 August 2026. Bank fee schedules change with 14–30 days' notice; FX margins change intraday. Get a live quote from at least two providers before any transfer above NZ$5,000.

Frequently asked questions

Which New Zealand bank has the cheapest international transfer fees?

On the advertised fee, ANZ, BNZ and Westpac are all NZ$0 for online transfers in foreign currency. On total cost including the exchange rate margin, BNZ was cheapest of the measured banks at NZ$77.46 on a NZ$5,000 transfer to the US, followed by ASB at NZ$84.58 and Kiwibank at NZ$108.39. All three cost four to six times more than the cheapest specialist provider on the same transfer.

What is a telegraphic transfer fee in New Zealand?

A telegraphic transfer, or TT, is the older name for a SWIFT international payment. The telegraphic transfer fee is the flat charge your bank adds for sending it — currently NZ$0 to NZ$10 online and NZ$15 to NZ$35 in branch across the five major NZ banks. It is separate from, and usually much smaller than, the exchange rate margin.

Do NZ banks charge to receive money from overseas?

Yes. BNZ charges NZ$10, Kiwibank NZ$12, and ANZ, ASB and Westpac NZ$15 to credit an inbound international payment to your account. ANZ waives it under NZ$300 equivalent; ASB and Westpac waive it at NZ$100 or less. The fee comes out of the money that arrives, so the recipient absorbs it.

What exchange rate margin do New Zealand banks add?

No NZ bank publishes its margin. Working backwards from measured total costs, the implied margin on a NZ$5,000 transfer to US dollars is about 1.55% at BNZ, 1.4–1.6% at ASB and around 1.97% at Kiwibank. Independent surveys put the general band at 1.5–3% for major currencies and as high as 5% for Pacific currencies. On NZ$10,000 a 2% margin is NZ$200.

Is it cheaper to send money online or in a branch?

Always online. The online fee is NZ$0 at ANZ, BNZ and Westpac and NZ$10 at Kiwibank; the branch equivalents are NZ$15, NZ$25, NZ$30 and NZ$25. The exchange rate does not improve at the counter, so the branch premium buys you assistance and nothing else. It is worth paying for an unusual currency or a large irreversible payment.

Should I send New Zealand dollars or the destination currency?

Send the destination currency. BNZ and Westpac both charge NZ$5 extra for sending in NZD, and BNZ adds a NZ$12 correspondent fee on top. Worse, if you send NZD, a bank offshore performs the conversion at a rate you never see and cannot negotiate. Converting before it leaves New Zealand keeps the rate visible.

Does "no transfer fee" mean the transfer is free?

No. It means the bank's own flat fee is waived. The exchange rate margin, which is 80–100% of the cost on any transfer above about NZ$1,500, is unaffected. BNZ's advertised NZ$0 online fee still produced a NZ$77.46 total cost on a NZ$5,000 transfer to the US, all of it in the rate.

Which NZ bank card has no foreign transaction fee?

ANZ charges 0% currency conversion on personal credit cards, and Westpac's Fee Free Mastercard and ASB's Visa Flex also carry no foreign currency fee. Elsewhere the charge is 1.83% to 2.50%. Kiwibank's 1.85% applies to any transaction processed offshore, including ones billed in New Zealand dollars.

How long does a bank international transfer take from New Zealand?

One to three business days is typical, and up to five for less common corridors. BNZ says many transfers arrive the same business day; ASB quotes one to two business days; Kiwibank quotes one to three, with Australia often same-day. Specialist providers commonly settle major currencies within hours, though the cut-off time you send by matters more than the provider.

Can I avoid the inward international payment fee?

Only by not receiving a SWIFT wire. If you hold a multi-currency account with local receiving details in the sender's currency — USD, GBP, EUR, AUD and several others — the sender makes a domestic payment in their own country, so there is no inbound wire for your NZ bank to charge for. You then convert to NZD when you choose. That is the single most effective fix for anyone paid regularly from overseas.

Where to go next

For a bank-by-bank breakdown with worked numbers at three transfer sizes, see ANZ vs Wise, ASB vs Wise, BNZ vs Wise, Westpac vs Wise and Kiwibank vs Wise. For the biggest single corridor out of New Zealand, sending money to Australia from NZ covers the trans-Tasman specifics, including which banks settle same-day. If you need physical notes rather than a transfer, start with currency exchange near me.