Japan Post Bank and the Megabanks: What an Overseas Transfer Really Costs

Most guides to sending money abroad from Japan treat the four big domestic institutions as one undifferentiated block called "the banks", quote a single fee, and move on. That is not much use if you actually hold an account at one of them. The four charge different amounts, gate their cheaper channels behind different requirements, cap transfers at different levels, and — in one case that a lot of people have not caught up with — no longer offer the service in the form you remember. This article is a reference on the institutions themselves: what Japan Post Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui and Mizuho each actually offer for an overseas transfer, what each channel costs, what you need in place before you can use it, and where each one will stop you. If what you want is the argument about how much of the price is hidden, that is a separate piece: Wise vs Japanese banks: what 100,000 yen really costs.

Reading a Japanese bank's fee page without adding up the wrong numbers

Before the institution-by-institution detail, one piece of arithmetic hygiene, because it determines whether every figure below means what you think it means. A bank transfer abroad involves up to three separate charges, and they are genuinely separate — different things, levied for different reasons, and in two of the three cases not necessarily levied at all.

The published transfer fee is the headline number, and it is the one you will definitely pay. It is what the rest of this article is mostly about.

The yen exchange handling charge — the lifting charge, typically 0.05 percent with a 2,500 yen minimum — is the one people wrongly add on. It applies to foreign exchange transactions where no conversion happens at the Japanese bank: a yen-denominated remittance where the yen travels abroad and someone else converts it, or a transfer out of a foreign currency deposit account in the same currency. SMBC Trust Bank's own definition is a transaction carried out in the same currency, where no exchange takes place. If you are doing the ordinary thing — handing the bank yen, having the bank convert it, sending the foreign currency — you should not expect this charge, because the bank earns on the conversion instead.

Correspondent bank charges are not a surcharge either. A transfer over the SWIFT network usually passes through an intermediary institution that takes a cut, and what the bank sells you is a choice about who absorbs it. Elect to cover those charges yourself and the bank bills you a set amount up front. Decline, and they are deducted from the money while it is in transit, and your recipient gets less. The cost exists either way; you are choosing which end of the transfer notices it.

There is a fourth cost, which is the margin built into the exchange rate. Of the four institutions here, only Mizuho publishes it. That absence is dealt with in each section below and at length in the companion article.

Japan Post Bank: the 2025 change most people have not heard about

Japan Post Bank (Yucho Ginko) used to be the obvious answer for a foreign resident without a megabank relationship. There are post offices everywhere, the account is easy to open, and you could walk in and send money abroad over the counter. That route is closed.

International remittance at post office counters ended on 29 August 2025. The route through Yucho Direct, the internet banking service, ended two days later on 31 August 2025. What replaced both is a web-only product launched in mid-July 2025 and marketed as Yucho's international remittance service. If you have been told by a colleague that you can send money from the post office, or if you are reading a guide written before autumn 2025, that advice is now simply out of date.

What it costs and what it caps

The fee is 3,000 yen per transfer, flat. On published fees alone that is the lowest of the four institutions in this article, and it is the reason Japan Post Bank still belongs in the conversation despite everything below.

The limits are tighter than the megabanks', and they are worth checking against your actual sending pattern before you commit:

Note the wording on the first row: under one million yen, not up to it. If you are sending a lump sum — a deposit on a property back home, a year of tuition, the proceeds of something you sold — this is the constraint that decides whether Japan Post Bank can do the job at all.

The charges your recipient pays

Japan Post Bank publishes something the megabanks are vaguer about: a schedule of the intermediary bank charges deducted from the money in transit. These are not billed to you. They come out of what lands in your recipient's account.

Ten US dollars off a 100,000 yen transfer is a meaningful proportion of the money, and it sits on top of the 3,000 yen you already paid. The headline fee is the lowest of the four; the amount arriving is a different question. As everywhere else in this article, Japan Post Bank does not publish the margin inside the exchange rate it applies, so the full cost of the transfer cannot be worked out in advance by anyone outside the bank.

Mitsubishi UFJ: the lowest published megabank fee online, with a rule change that catches account holders

Mitsubishi UFJ (MUFG) prices its online channel, Mitsubishi UFJ Direct, well below its counter, and splits the online price by destination bank.

The 2,500 yen tier is worth a moment. It applies where the receiving institution is one of MUFG's overseas offices or partner banks, so whether you qualify depends entirely on where your recipient banks, not on anything about you. It costs nothing to check before you set up the transfer, and the 500 yen difference recurs on every transfer you ever make.

A counter transfer takes around three business days. Alongside the fee, MUFG publishes a yen exchange handling charge of 0.050 percent with a 2,500 yen minimum, which — as set out above — attaches to transfers where no conversion happens at the bank, not to an ordinary yen-to-foreign-currency remittance. Correspondent bank charges are 3,000 yen if you elect to cover them, and MUFG notes that it may bill you separately where the shortfall exceeds 100,000 yen.

Limits

Through internet banking, Mitsubishi UFJ caps transfers at 3,000,000 yen per transfer, 3,000,000 yen per day and 5,000,000 yen per month. That is three times Japan Post Bank's per-transfer ceiling and the most generous online allowance among the institutions here.

The savings account rule

On 9 March 2025, Mitsubishi UFJ stopped allowing overseas remittances to be funded from savings accounts (chochiku yokin). If your money sits in one, you need to move it into an ordinary deposit account first. This is the kind of change that produces a wasted trip to a branch, or a transfer that fails at the last screen for reasons the error message does not explain.

Mitsubishi UFJ does not publish the margin built into its exchange rate.

Sumitomo Mitsui: confident at the counter, contradictory online

Sumitomo Mitsui (SMBC) is the institution where we have to be careful about what can be stated as fact and what cannot.

The counter prices, which are clear

Per SMBC's fee schedule dated February 2026, a counter transfer costs 7,000 yen to SMBC's own overseas offices and partner banks and 7,500 yen to any other bank. Those two figures are published in one place, unambiguously, and you can plan around them.

The online price, which is not

SMBC's own published sources disagree with each other about the online fee for personal customers. Its PDF schedule shows a range of 2,500 to 3,500 yen, but that appears in the context of its corporate channels; its personal-banking web pages show 3,500 to 4,000 yen. The honest summary is that the online personal fee is somewhere around 3,500 to 4,000 yen, and that SMBC's published sources do not agree.

We are reporting the disagreement rather than picking a side, because picking a side would mean presenting a coin-flip as research. Practically: check the figure inside your own SMBC online banking, on the confirmation screen, before you authorise the transfer. That screen is the version that will actually be charged to you.

What you need before you can use it

SMBC requires an account and requires your My Number (kojin bango, the individual number) on file. Two categories of customer are excluded outright: those registered for telephone banking only, and those whose relationship with the bank is a card loan only. If either describes you, the international transfer service is not available on your existing relationship, whatever the fee page says.

Alongside the fee, SMBC publishes a yen exchange handling charge of 0.05 percent with a 2,500 yen minimum, subject to the same conditions described above. Correspondent bank charges are 2,500 yen if you elect to cover them, and SMBC states that up to 4,000 yen more may be billed to you afterwards — so even the prepaid option is not a closed number.

Country limits

For certain countries and regions, SMBC restricts personal transfers to 1,000,000 yen per month and 3,000,000 yen per year. Whether your destination is on that list is worth establishing before you build a plan around it, particularly if you are sending regular support to family rather than one-off amounts.

Sumitomo Mitsui does not publish the margin built into its exchange rate.

Mizuho: the most transparent pricing, behind the hardest door

Mizuho is two stories at once. It is the only one of the four that tells you the size of its exchange-rate margin, which is genuinely to its credit. It also advertises the lowest megabank fee of the four and attaches a condition to it that a newly arrived resident cannot satisfy.

The prices

Correspondent bank charges are 2,500 yen if you elect to cover them.

The margin, which is published

Mizuho states that its TTS rate — the rate at which it sells you foreign currency — includes an exchange handling charge of 1 yen per US dollar and 1.50 yen per euro. That is a disclosed margin, in currency units, available in advance.

You can convert it into a percentage yourself, and it is worth doing so once so that the scale sticks. Divide the charge by the exchange rate: at 150 yen to the dollar, 1 yen is about 0.67 percent; at 160 yen to the dollar, about 0.63 percent. On a 100,000 yen transfer into US dollars that is roughly 630 to 670 yen of margin depending on where the market sits on the day. We are giving the range rather than one figure because the answer moves with USD/JPY, and a single precise number would be a false one.

Put that beside the app fee and you get something the other three institutions cannot give you: a transfer whose cost is knowable before you send it. Five thousand yen plus roughly 630 to 670 yen, plus correspondent charges as a choice. At Japan Post Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ and Sumitomo Mitsui the same calculation cannot be completed, because one of its terms is not published anywhere.

The five conditions, and the catch-22 in the second one

The 5,000 yen app price is the lowest megabank fee published anywhere in this article, and reading it on a fee page you would reasonably assume you can use it. To qualify you must meet all five of the following:

• You are an individual rather than a company, and you have lived in Japan for six months or more.
• You have already carried out the same kind of transfer at a Mizuho counter within the past year.
• You have registered a debit card in the app.
• You have submitted your My Number.
• Your registered address matches where you currently live.

The second condition is the one to read twice. To use the cheap channel, you must first have used the expensive one — not a similar transfer, not any international transfer, but the same kind of transfer, made in person at a branch, within the previous twelve months.

Follow that through for someone who arrived in Japan this year and needs to send money to family this month. The app price is unavailable, because there is no prior counter transfer. To become eligible they must visit a branch during business hours and pay 8,000 yen to a Mizuho account abroad or 8,500 yen to any other bank, plus the published margin, plus correspondent charges one way or the other. And the six-month residence requirement means that for their first half-year in Japan, even the expensive route to eligibility is shut. The lowest-priced megabank channel published in Japan is structurally out of reach for exactly the people whose transfers are smallest and most frequent.

If you bank with Mizuho and expect to be sending money home for years, the practical response is to treat one counter transfer as an entry fee: make it deliberately and early, and it buys you the 5,000 yen price for the following twelve months.

Limits on the app channel

Once you qualify, the app allows two transfers per month, 3,000,000 yen per transfer and per day, and 5,000,000 yen over any thirty days, covering seven currencies across 32 countries. Two per month is the restriction most likely to bite: if you split remittances into several small payments across a month, this channel does not fit the way you send.

The four side by side

Read the last column before the first. Three of the four rows say "not published", which means the total cost of those transfers cannot be calculated in advance — the fee column is a partial answer being presented as a complete one. Mizuho's row is the only one you can finish, and it happens to show the highest fees. Whether the other three are cheaper or more expensive overall is not something anyone outside those banks can determine.

For context on the alternative shape of pricing: a non-bank provider quoted 987 yen in total to send 100,000 yen to US dollars on 16 August 2026, which is a live quote from that day rather than a published price list, and rates and fees both move. The comparison that decides anything is your own amount on the day you send, measured by what arrives rather than by what the fee page says.

The constraints that catch people out

Cost is not the only way a bank transfer goes wrong. Three published constraints account for a disproportionate share of wasted trips and returned money.

Your SMBC branch may not handle foreign exchange at all

Since 21 January 2019, Sumitomo Mitsui has withdrawn over-the-counter foreign exchange handling from many of its branches. The branch nearest you may hold your account, cash your cheques and open your time deposit, and still be unable to send money abroad. SMBC maintains a list of the branches that do handle it, and checking that list is the difference between one trip and two. This matters most for anyone doing a first counter transfer, and it is worth remembering that the same problem meets Mizuho customers making their qualifying counter transfer: a branch visit during business hours is a bigger cost in time than the fee is in money.

Mitsubishi UFJ will not send from a savings account

As above: since 9 March 2025, savings accounts cannot fund an overseas remittance at MUFG. Move the money to an ordinary deposit account first.

Transfers to Vietnam and India need a purpose stated in English

Mizuho publishes a standing notice that transfers to Vietnam and India must state the purpose of the remittance specifically in English, because the receiving banks require it, and that transfers without it may be delayed or returned. This is a documented failure pattern rather than a theoretical risk, and it is the kind of thing that turns a three-day transfer into a three-week one.

The practical version: write something concrete. "Support for family living expenses", "payment of university tuition for my son", "repayment of a personal loan" — a description a compliance officer at the receiving bank can act on without contacting anyone. A single vague word, or a purpose written in Japanese, is what triggers the delay. If Vietnam is your destination, the corridor-specific issues are covered in sending money from Japan to Vietnam.

Which institution suits which situation

No single answer covers everyone, so here is the shape of the decision rather than a verdict.

• You hold a Japan Post Bank account and send under a million yen at a time. The 3,000 yen web-only fee is the lowest published fee here, but budget for the intermediary deduction taken from your recipient's money, and remember it can be taken more than once.
• You bank with Mitsubishi UFJ. Check whether your recipient's bank is an MUFG overseas office or partner, which drops the online fee to 2,500 yen, and confirm the money is not sitting in a savings account.
• You bank with Sumitomo Mitsui. Confirm the online fee on your own confirmation screen rather than from any published page, and check the branch list before planning a counter visit.
• You bank with Mizuho and have been in Japan more than six months. One deliberate counter transfer unlocks 5,000 yen in the app for a year, and Mizuho is the only one of the four whose full cost you can estimate in advance.
• You arrived in Japan recently. Every cheap bank channel here is gated on something you may not yet have: six months of residence, a prior counter transfer, My Number on file, an address that matches your registration. That is worth knowing before you assume a bank is your default option.

For the documents each institution will ask for, see documents you need to send money abroad from Japan. For the full landscape including specialist remittance operators, which price differently again and are worth a look on some corridors, start with how to send money home from Japan.

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