How to receive USD in India: the GST nobody quotes, and the register nobody checks
India is the corridor with too many answers rather than too few. Wise, Payoneer, PayPal and half a dozen India-built rails all want your invoices, and every one of them quotes its price in a different shape, so nothing lines up. Two distortions run through every comparison you will read, including the ones the rails write about each other. The first is GST. Eighteen percent lands on the fee for the India-domiciled services, which means a headline nineteen dollars is really twenty-two forty-two. Our calculator has no field for tax charged on a fee, so read our fee column as before GST and add it where we say it applies. The second is that almost nobody tells you which of these companies is actually authorised by the Reserve Bank to do this. The Reserve Bank publishes the register, it is public, and searching it takes a minute. Wise is on it, which we mention first because Wise is also the company that pays us commission. PayPal and Payoneer are not on it, which means less than it sounds: both have announced in-principle approval, and that keeps a company off the list until the full authorisation is granted. We checked the register ourselves and we say per provider what it showed, presences and absences both. On the thing readers most often get wrong: yes, an Indian freelancer can get real US account details from Wise, the kind a client pays by ordinary domestic transfer. It sits on the business side of the product, but the eligibility list opens with sole trader and freelancer, and that category needs nothing but a PAN in your own name and a personal bank account. No company, no GST number. Finally, the part that matters more than the fee: sort out your proof-of-remittance document before you optimise pennies, because that is what your accountant and the GST rules actually run on.
By George I. · Last updated:
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Provider comparison: receiving $1,000 USD in India
Using live mid-market rate as of 2026-10-01 · open.er-api.com
| Provider | Net received (INR) | Effective fee | FX margin | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WiseBest value | 95,501 | 0.52% | Mid-market | ~1 day |
| Payoneer | 92,566 | 1.00% | +2.6%(est.) | ~1 day |
| Bank Wire | 90,785 | 3.50% | +2.0%(est.) | ~3 days |
| PayPal | 88,992 | 4.43% | +3.0% | ~1 day |
Wise: yes, a freelancer qualifies, despite the word business
The one we would start with, and we should say upfront that Wise is the affiliate programme this site earns from, so check the table rather than taking our word for it. What you get is a Wise Business account with US account details, a routing number and an account number, so an American client pays you the way they pay a domestic supplier. It says business on the tin and that puts people off unnecessarily. Wise lists five accepted categories and the first is sole trader or freelancer, described as making money as an individual, with your PAN under your personal name and your rupee receiving account under your personal name. Only the separate sole proprietorship category, the one for trading under a business name, needs a GST number or an IEC. Verification is video KYC through Aadhaar OTP, PAN and Digilocker, and Wise says the account is ready inside two working days. On the authorisation question we check for every provider on this page: Wise Payments India Private Limited is on the Reserve Bank register, in the cross-border category for inward transactions, dated 12 March 2026. We earn commission from Wise, so treat that as a fact to go and check rather than as a recommendation. On price, receiving dollars by ACH is free. Wise publishes 6.11 dollars per payment for receiving a dollar wire or a SWIFT payment, on its US pricing page rather than an India one, and the India quote we pulled prices an inbound SWIFT payment identically to an ACH one, so we cannot tell you whether an Indian business profile actually pays it. Treat 6.11 as the worst case and take ACH if your client can send it. Then comes the conversion, and here is a gap worth knowing about: Wise does not publish its dollars to rupees conversion fee anywhere we could find. Its India business receiving page says only that the conversion fee depends on the currency, and the 0.25% figure floating around its India pages belongs to a pounds to euros worked example with a volume discount applied, so anyone quoting it at you for this corridor is repeating something that was never about rupees. We got the real number out of Wise own pricing system on 25 September 2026, with an India business profile: a flat 0.99 dollars plus about 0.42% of the amount, at the mid-market rate with no spread on top. That is a little over five dollars on a thousand before tax. Two more charges to plan for. An eFIRC costs the equivalent of two dollars per transfer and is issued automatically, arriving by email two to three days after the transfer completes. And GST at 18% applies, on the conversion fee and on the eFIRC fee, which Wise states plainly, and which is why the same quote shows 6.09 dollars all in on a thousand rather than five and a bit. Limits run to 2.5 million rupees per transaction at the top and five dollars at the bottom, and Wise says more than half its transfers settle within two hours.
Payoneer: the free automatic FIRA is the real feature
The default if your work arrives through Upwork or Fiverr, and it has one feature on this corridor that nothing else matches. The FIRA is free, automatic and per payment. Payoneer says the document is generated every time a payment is processed into your bank account, regardless of where the money came from, and is available to download within 24 to 72 hours, with no charge and nothing to request. Its own page lists no exclusions by amount or country. If the paperwork is the part you dread, that alone may decide it. The cost is muddier, and on one line Payoneer contradicts itself. Its help centre prices receiving dollars into a receiving account at 1% with a one dollar minimum, dollars not being your local currency as an Indian resident, and names only China as an exception. Its own India page says the opposite, that receiving payments in dollars is free for customers in India. Neither page carries a date and we could not work out which is current, so our table charges the 1%: read our Payoneer number as the pessimistic one and check your own fee screen before you compare it with anything. The withdrawal is published as a range rather than a rate, 1.2% to 4%, and Payoneer does not say where the rupee sits inside it, so we model the midpoint and flag the row as an estimate, which also bars it from our badge. There is a 29.95 dollar annual fee if the account takes in under 6,000 dollars in any twelve consecutive months. One India-specific behaviour is worth planning around, and it is better than we first thought: Payoneer own India page says that for customers based in India, payments received to your Payoneer account are automatically withdrawn to your local bank account or EEFC account within 24 hours. So the dollars do not stay at Payoneer. Whether they stay dollars is up to you, because an EEFC account is a foreign currency account and Payoneer will send to one. On the register, Payoneer is not on the Reserve Bank list, and it announced Reserve Bank in-principle approval as a cross-border payment aggregator in January 2026, which is the stage before that list.
How much does PayPal charge to receive USD in India?
Available, familiar, and the most expensive thing on this page. Commercial receiving is 4.40% plus a fixed fee, thirty cents on dollars, and then 3.0% above the base exchange rate when the money is converted. To receive at all you have to verify your PAN, add an Indian bank account and pick a purpose code, which PayPal walks you through. The paperwork is better than the price: a weekly digital FIRA is free and fully automated, and a transaction-specific one costs 100 rupees plus GST, requested through Citibank and taking three to five business days if you bank with Citi and seven to ten if you do not. On the authorisation question, the answer turned out to be straightforward once we read both sources rather than one. PayPal Payments Private Limited is not on the Reserve Bank register of authorised payment systems as published on 8 September 2026, and neither is Payoneer, but PayPal announced Reserve Bank in-principle approval to operate as a cross-border payment aggregator for exports in May 2025, and an in-principle holder does not join that register until the full authorisation is granted. So the absence is a stage in a process rather than a red flag, and it is shared with a provider we rank above PayPal. The reason to skip PayPal on this corridor is the price, not the paperwork.
Skydo: authorised, cheap at size, and a lesson in GST
An India-built rail, properly authorised, and the clearest illustration of the GST problem on this page. Skydo charges nineteen dollars for invoices up to two thousand, twenty-nine dollars from two thousand to ten thousand, and 0.3% above ten thousand, at the live FX rate with no margin on the exchange. Those are the numbers everyone quotes. Skydo own calculator then adds GST at 18% to the fee, so the nineteen is really 22.42 and the twenty-nine is really 34.22. We checked because a competitor made the claim and we assumed it was a smear. It is not, it is correct. That is why Skydo is described here rather than ranked in the table above: its price is tiered by invoice size and our model holds a single flat fee, so any number we put in the table would be right at one invoice size and wrong at every other. Do the arithmetic for your own invoice. On a nine thousand dollar invoice, Skydo at 34.22 all in is very hard to beat. On a five hundred dollar one it is dreadful. Skydo Technologies Private Limited appears on the Reserve Bank register as an authorised cross-border payment aggregator for imports and exports, dated 8 January 2026. What we could not confirm is whether an unregistered individual freelancer can onboard, as against a registered exporter or business, so check that before you build a plan on it.
Xflow: authorised, and a different tax structure entirely
The other authorised India-built rail we can describe with confidence, and it has a genuinely different tax structure that nobody explains. Pricing is tiered like Skydo: twelve dollars for invoices up to two thousand on the starter plan and 0.6% above that, or twenty dollars up to five thousand on the growth plan and 0.4% above, with custom pricing for ten thousand and up. It uses the mid-market rate. The interesting part is GST. Xflow says it does not charge GST on its services because it is a US-domiciled entity, which sounds like a straight saving against Skydo. Read the next sentence though: it also says the flat fees may require GST to be paid through the reverse charge mechanism, which moves the obligation onto you rather than removing it. Whether that is better depends entirely on whether you are already filing under reverse charge for anything else. Ask your accountant rather than assuming it is free money. Xflow Payments India Private Limited is on the Reserve Bank register, dated 18 February 2026. It is not in our table for the same reason Skydo is not: tiered pricing that a single flat fee cannot represent.
The rails we will not rank, and why
Four more names come up constantly and we are not going to rank any of them, for reasons that differ and are all worth knowing. BriskPe refused every request we made to its website, so the only thing we can tell you from a source we actually opened is that GoBrisk Technologies Private Limited is on the Reserve Bank authorised register, dated 26 December 2025. Its fees circulate widely and we have verified none of them. Karbon publishes no rates at all: its own fees page lists categories and sends you to a pricing calculator, which is a legitimate way to run a business and an impossible one to put in a comparison table. It is also not on the authorised register. Winvesta pricing page turned out to be for its investment product, and the page that would carry its collection charges returns a 404; it is not on the register either. Infinity publishes a flat 0.5% described as all inclusive with no FX markup, which would be excellent if we knew whether all inclusive means GST is inside it, and its own page does not say; it is not on the register. Being absent from that register is not an accusation, because it covers one specific authorisation and there are other ways to operate legally. It is simply a check you can run yourself, and we would rather point you at it than pretend we can rank companies that do not publish a price.
The wire, and where a real FIRC comes from
The old route, still the one your bank understands best, and on a large enough invoice still competitive. Your client American bank charges a flat fee to send, an intermediary may take a cut on the way, and your Indian bank buys the dollars at its own rate for the day rather than at the mid-market rate. We could not open a rate card or a schedule of charges for any Indian bank on the day we checked, so the figures in our table are carried from other wire corridors and flagged as estimates accordingly, and we are not going to tell you what the spread is. What holds regardless is that the gap between the rate your bank uses and the mid rate is not a line item anywhere, so the only way to see it is to compare the rupees that landed against the mid rate on the day. Ask your branch what rate it will apply before the money arrives rather than after. The reason to consider a wire anyway is documentary. It lands through an Authorised Dealer bank, which is the entity that can issue a FIRC, and if your business ever needs the full certificate rather than the advice document, that is where it comes from.
Revolut has an Indian licence, but not for this
Not an option for this corridor, and the reason is specific rather than vague. Revolut has a full Indian licence, announced in April 2025, but it is a prepaid payment instrument authorisation: domestic prepaid cards and wallets with UPI. That is a spending product, not a receiving one. Revolut also does not appear on the Reserve Bank register of authorised cross-border payment aggregators. Between those two facts there is no route for an Indian resident to take a dollar invoice from a foreign client through Revolut today. We did not find a Revolut page stating that negative outright, so this is our reading of its licence scope rather than a quote.
How we calculate these figures
The net received figure deducts the provider's published flat fee and percentage fee from the send amount, then converts at the live mid-market rate from open.er-api.com minus the provider's FX markup in basis points. Rates on this page refresh hourly (ISR). Fee data is sourced from each provider's public pricing page and verified periodically. Not every provider publishes an FX spread. Where one does not, we estimate it, mark the row “est.” in the FX margin column, and exclude it from the best-value badge, so the option we highlight is always one whose spread we can source.
Fee data for this corridor last verified 2026-06-02 or later; each provider card shows its own date. · Open-source fee data on GitHub
Frequently asked questions
Can an Indian freelancer really get US account details from Wise?
Yes, and the confusion is about the word business. Wise India receiving product is licensed as a cross-border payment aggregator for business customers, which makes people assume they need a company. They do not. Wise lists five accepted categories and the first is sole trader or freelancer: you make money as an individual, your PAN is under your personal name, and your rupee receiving account is under your personal name. That is the whole requirement. The separate sole proprietorship category, for people trading under a business name, is the one that asks for a GST number or an IEC. Verification runs as video KYC using Aadhaar OTP, PAN and Digilocker, and Wise says the account is usable within two working days. The details you get are US domestic ones, so your client pays them like any American supplier rather than sending an international wire.
What is the difference between a FIRC, a FIRA and an eBRC, and which do I need?
This is the question that actually matters and almost every guide blurs it. A FIRC, a foreign inward remittance certificate, is the formal instrument and only an Authorised Dealer bank can issue one. A FIRA, sometimes written eFIRA or eFIRC, is the advice document you get per payment from your provider or its partner bank, and for a freelancer exporting services it is normally what suffices. An eBRC is an electronic bank realisation certificate generated on the foreign trade portal from the remittance your bank reports, and it is not a goods-only document, which is the thing most guides get wrong and we had wrong too. DGFT added a mandatory Mode of Export of Services field to the services export side of the eBRC format in 2025, matching each realisation to one of the four modes of supply used in the WTO services agreement, so service exports sit squarely inside it. We take that from DGFT notices reported elsewhere rather than from the portal, which refused every request we made on the day we checked, so treat it as reported rather than read. The reason it is still probably not your problem is a different one: you need an eBRC when you hold an IEC and are claiming something under the Foreign Trade Policy, not because you sell services rather than goods. What you want day to day is a provider that hands you the per-payment document without being asked. Payoneer does, free and automatically, within 24 to 72 hours. Wise does, automatically, for the equivalent of two dollars per transfer plus GST. PayPal gives you a free weekly one automatically, or a transaction-specific one for 100 rupees plus GST through Citibank. Sort this out before you optimise the fee, because it is what your accountant will ask for.
Why does the fee I was quoted not match the fee that was charged?
Almost always GST. Eighteen percent lands on the service fee for India-domiciled providers, and nearly every headline number you see is quoted before it. Skydo nineteen dollars becomes 22.42 once its own calculator adds the tax. Wise states that it charges GST on the conversion fee and on the eFIRC fee. Our comparison table has no field for tax charged on top of a fee, so the figures there are before GST and you should add it where it applies. Xflow is the odd one out and worth reading carefully rather than celebrating: it says it does not charge GST because it is a US entity, and in the same breath that its flat fees may require GST through the reverse charge mechanism, which moves the job to you rather than making it disappear.
How do I know a provider is allowed to do this?
Check the Reserve Bank own register. Since the cross-border payment aggregator framework came in, companies that collect export payments for Indian sellers need a specific authorisation, and the RBI publishes the list of everyone holding one, alongside the other payment systems it authorises. It is public and searching it takes a minute. On the version published on 8 September 2026 we found Wise Payments India Private Limited, dated 12 March 2026, in the cross-border category for inward transactions, which is the direction that matters here, and Skydo Technologies, Xflow Payments India and GoBrisk Technologies, which is BriskPe, dated 8 January 2026, 18 February 2026 and 26 December 2025. Wise is the company this site earns commission from, so that first entry is a fact for you to check rather than a reason to trust us. Not on the list: PayPal, Payoneer, Karbon, Winvesta and Infinity. Revolut Payments India Private Limited is on the list, but for prepaid payment instruments, dated 4 April 2025, which is a spending licence rather than a receiving one. Now the part most guides get wrong, us included until we read it properly. An absence is not a verdict. Both PayPal and Payoneer have announced Reserve Bank in-principle approval for exactly this activity, PayPal in May 2025 and Payoneer in January 2026, and an in-principle holder does not appear on this list until the full authorisation is granted. Wise itself sat in that gap: it announced in-principle approval in 2025 and appears on the register only from March 2026. So read the register as a check on where a company has got to in a process, not as a list of who is allowed to exist, and if you are about to route serious money through a rail you had not heard of last week, it is still the first place to look.
Can I hold dollars in India instead of converting straight away?
Yes, but not in an app, and not indefinitely. The account built for this is an EEFC account, an Exchange Earners Foreign Currency account held with an Authorised Dealer bank. The Reserve Bank own FAQ on it says all categories of foreign exchange earners resident in India may open one, individuals included, and that professional fees earned by rendering services in your individual capacity are a permitted credit, so a freelancer is not shut out of it. The catch is the conversion rule in the same FAQ: the sum total of the accruals in the account during a calendar month has to be converted into rupees on or before the last day of the succeeding calendar month, after adjusting for anything you have used for an approved purpose. So it is a timing tool, and a real one if you think the rupee is about to move your way this month, but it is not a dollar savings account, and how long you actually get depends on where in the month the money lands. The apps are a different matter. Payoneer own India page says payments are automatically withdrawn within 24 hours, to your local bank account or EEFC account, so Payoneer can feed a foreign currency account but cannot be the place you park money. Wise says its India account details cannot be used to hold in Balances, for regulatory reasons. That is why this corridor has no hold-your-dollars comparison: the only real answer is a bank account with a deadline attached, which is a conversation with a bank rather than a choice between apps.
Do I need GST registration if all my clients are abroad?
Export of services is zero rated, which is not the same as being outside GST, and the registration threshold question is genuinely contested among practitioners. The usual figures are twenty lakh rupees, or ten lakh in the special category states, and whether your export turnover counts toward that threshold is where the disagreement sits. We are not going to resolve an argument that chartered accountants are still having. What we will say is that if you register, the mechanism you want is a letter of undertaking, Form GST RFD-11, filed on the GST portal and renewed each financial year, which lets you export without paying IGST up front. The alternative is paying 18% IGST and claiming it back, which is a cash flow problem you do not need. Take the threshold question to an accountant with your actual numbers.
What purpose code do I use?
For most software and IT consulting work it is P0802, the code for software implementation and consultancy not covered by the SOFTEX route. There are neighbouring codes for packaged software products, for marketing services and for digital products, and getting it wrong is your problem rather than your bank. The code is recorded by whichever bank or platform receives the money and reported under the foreign exchange rules, based on what you tell them. Take the list from the Reserve Bank rather than from the vendor landing pages, several of which have built a page per code for search traffic and are not authoritative.
What happened to Section 44ADA, and is presumptive taxation still the right way to be taxed?
For a lot of freelancers it is, and the mechanism is the one you know: you declare half your gross receipts as income and pay tax on that, without keeping detailed books. What has changed is the statute it lives in, and this is not a rumour. The Income-tax Act, 2025 came into force on 1 April 2026 and the Income-tax Act, 1961 stands repealed from that date, which the Income Tax Department says in its own guidance on the new Act, and the 1961 Act continues to govern tax years that began before then. So Section 44ADA is the right reference for earlier years and the wrong one for this year. Tax commentary indexes the replacement provision for professions as section 58 of the new Act, on the same basis and with the same receipt ceilings, including the higher ceiling for people whose receipts arrive almost entirely electronically, which describes anyone being paid by foreign clients through the rails on this page. We could not open the statute itself to confirm the section number or the limits, because incometaxindia.gov.in refused every request we made, so take the section number and the ceiling from your accountant against your own receipts rather than from us.
What is the cheapest way to receive dollars in India?
It depends on your invoice size more than on anything else, which is why a single answer misleads. Of the providers we can put in a table, Wise comes out cheapest at the thousand dollar comparison amount: free to receive by ACH, then 0.99 dollars plus about 0.42% to convert at the mid-market rate, which its own quote shows as 6.09 dollars once 18% GST is added, plus the equivalent of two dollars for the eFIRC and GST on that too. Payoneer is next, and its published range makes precision impossible. PayPal is a long way behind. But the tiered India-built rails change the answer at size: Skydo at 34.22 all in on a nine thousand dollar invoice is extremely hard to beat, and dreadful on a five hundred dollar one. We cannot rank them because our table holds one flat fee and their price moves in steps. So do this: take your typical invoice, run it through two of these for real on the same afternoon, add GST where it applies, and compare the rupees that land rather than the percentages quoted.
Written by George I. (20+ years in international payments). Last updated: .
Fees are estimates from publicly available pricing. Verify with your provider before transferring. Nothing on this site is financial or tax advice. How we make money.