Sending Money to Support Family Abroad

Supporting family in another country usually means the same transfer, again and again: a set amount to a parent, an adult child, or a relative abroad, every month or whenever it's needed. On any single payment the exchange rate barely seems to matter. Across a year of them, the rate and the margin add up, and the few minutes of admin each time adds up too.

This page is about sending regular support to family abroad and setting it up so it more or less runs itself. If the money coming back is your own income rather than support for someone else, our repatriating income to the UK page is the better fit. And if what you're funding is school or university fees, those have their own timing and often go straight to an institution, so start with paying for education abroad instead.

The friction isn't any one transfer, it's the repetition. A standing arrangement that converts and sends the same amount on a schedule takes the effort out of it, and a consistent rate with a transparent margin matters more over a run of payments than it would on a one-off. That's the case for setting this up properly rather than sending ad hoc each time.

The decision that matters is whether to keep sending by hand or set the support up as a standing arrangement. For a payment that repeats, regular transfers are the natural fit: you agree the amount and the schedule once, and each conversion and payment runs on that basis without you logging in to arrange it. That removes both the admin and the temptation to send on whichever day you happen to remember, which is rarely the best one. For a one-off larger amount on top, our guide to large transfers sets out how those are priced and checked.

Setting up an account needs the usual photo ID and proof of address, and you'll need your family member's local bank details for the receiving end. Regular support payments are typically modest, so the source-of-funds checks that apply to large sums often don't come into it, but a larger one-off can trigger them, in which case proof of source of funds, such as a payslip or a bank statement, is what our compliance team will ask for. There's no fixed cap on what you send.

Sending money to family is usually straightforward, but tax can come into it once the amounts get large. In the UK, gifts can interact with inheritance tax: there's a £3,000 annual gift exemption, an exemption for regular gifts made out of surplus income, and a seven-year rule under which larger gifts can still count towards your estate if you die within that period. The country your family lives in may treat incoming gifts differently again. None of that affects a modest monthly transfer, but for larger or regular sums it's worth a word with an accountant.