Sending money from the UK to Jamaica — the corridor that costs more than it should

Three generations in, and still paying too much to send money home

Paulette's grandmother came to Nottingham from St. Elizabeth parish in 1961. Her mother was born in the UK. Paulette was born in the UK. She has never lived in Jamaica, but she has cousins there, aunts and uncles in their seventies, a grandmother who turned ninety-two last year and still expects a call on her birthday. Every few months, Paulette sends money — for the cousin who is studying, for the repairs on the family house, for the quiet ongoing contribution that says the family is still one family even across four thousand miles of ocean.

She has been doing this for twelve years. She has never stopped noticing that the cost feels higher than it should for a corridor between two English-speaking countries with sixty years of shared history, shared culture, and one of the oldest diaspora relationships in the UK. She is right. It is.

The diaspora and the corridor it depends on

There are approximately 600,000 people of Caribbean heritage in England and Wales, the majority of Jamaican origin — one of the oldest and most established diaspora communities in the country (ONS, Census 2021). The Windrush generation and their descendants built a community that now spans three and four generations, concentrated in London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol, Leeds, and Manchester. Many of them maintain active family ties in Jamaica — regular calls, visits, and the consistent monthly or quarterly send that keeps those ties financial as well as emotional.

Jamaica received approximately USD 3.8 billion in remittances in 2023, a figure representing roughly 18% of the country's GDP — one of the highest remittance-to-GDP ratios in the Western Hemisphere (Bank of Jamaica, 2024). For Jamaican households that depend on contributions from relatives in the UK, the US, and Canada, the transfer is not occasional income. It is the budget. It pays for school fees, for utilities, for the mortgage on the house the family built with twenty years of contributions from abroad.

Remittances represent approximately 18% of Jamaica's GDP — among the highest ratios in the Caribbean. For the households that receive them, the cost of the corridor is not a percentage on a fee schedule. It is money not arriving.

— Bank of Jamaica, 2024; World Bank, 2025

Why the Caribbean costs more than almost everywhere else

The Caribbean sits among the world's most expensive remittance-receiving sub-regions. The global average cost of sending USD 200 internationally was 6.49% in 2025 (World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, 2025) — itself more than double the UN Sustainable Development Goal target of 3%. The Caribbean corridors from the UK typically land above that global average, not below it. A community with sixty years of sending history is still paying some of the highest rates in the world to move money across the Atlantic.

Three factors explain why.

The first is scale. South Asia is the cheapest receiving sub-region because it handles the largest volumes — India alone received USD 129.4 billion in 2024, and the sheer competition among providers for that volume drives costs down. The UK-to-Jamaica corridor is a fraction of that size. Fewer competing providers, smaller transaction volumes, and less incentive to price aggressively combine to keep the corridor expensive relative to its actual complexity.

The second is de-risking. Over the past decade, major international banks have progressively withdrawn correspondent-banking relationships from Caribbean institutions — not because of any specific problem with those institutions, but because the compliance cost of maintaining the relationships outweighed the revenue they generated at small-corridor volumes. Fewer correspondent relationships means fewer competitive routes, which means higher prices for the sender who has no choice but to use what remains.