In 2025, money transfers sent from Haiti to the Dominican Republic reached $661.8 per transaction, which is the highest average among the recorded countries of origin.
In 2025, money transfers sent from Haiti to the Dominican Republic reached $661.8 per transaction, the highest average among the recorded countries of origin. At first glance, this amount puts one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean ahead of Switzerland, Germany, and the United States in a ranking where you wouldn’t expect to see it at the top.
However, this top spot should be interpreted with caution. It only refers to the average amount of a single transaction. It doesn’t mean that Haiti has become the main sender of transfers to the Dominican Republic, let alone that it is exerting a growing financial influence on the neighboring economy.
Statistics from the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic (BCRD), reported in March by the Dominican daily Diario Libre, show that a transaction from Haiti averaged $661.8 in 2025, compared to $606.5 from Switzerland and $414.4 from Germany. The overall average of transfers received by the Dominican Republic was $273.2 per transaction.
The average amount from Haiti was thus more than double the general average and more than two and a half times that of a transaction from the United States, which was $260.7.
The growth over time is also remarkable. The average from Haiti went from $366.8 in 2023 to $559.5 in 2024, a 52.5% increase in one year. It then reached $661.8 in 2025. During the first two months of 2026, it dropped back to $609, placing Haiti behind Switzerland, whose transactions averaged $647.7.dollars.These figures show the average size of transactions, not their total weight. Indeed, an average comes from dividing the total amount transferred by the number of recorded transactions.
So a country can have a high average amount while actually representing a small share of the funds received. Conversely, the United States can have a lower average while still dominating the remittances received by the Dominican Republic, thanks to a much higher number of transactions.
Data published by the Dominican Ministry of Economy illustrate this difference. In May 2025, the United States accounted for 83.1% of remittances received through formal channels in the Dominican Republic. Haiti accounted for only about 1.4%, behind Spain, which was credited with 5.9%.The comparison shows the limits of the ranking. With an average of $260.70 per transaction, the United States remains by far the main source of remittances sent to the Dominican Republic. Haiti, despite its $661.80 per transaction, occupies a much more modest place in the overall flow.
So how can we explain, in these conditions, that transfers from an economy in crisis reach such high individual amounts?
The presence of Haitian students in Dominican higher education institutions provides one clue. The 2023-2024 Survey on Foreign Student Spending, published by the BCRD in March 2026, estimates that 2,250 non-resident foreign students are covered by its statistical scope. Haitians make up 51.7% of them, or about 1,163 people.Their average monthly spending amounts to $1,258.1. This includes $169.4 in academic expenses and $1,088.7 in non-academic expenses, such as housing, food, transportation, telecommunications, health, and personal needs.
This spending pattern can lead to higher transfers than ordinary family remittances. Tuition fees, rent, and certain health expenses often need to be paid in relatively large amounts and on set dates. Families might therefore prefer sending money less often but in larger amounts.
However, the survey does not show that students are the main recipients of transfers from Haiti. It looks at their expenses and sources of funding, but it doesn’t link each transaction recorded by transfer companies to a specific status of the recipient.Another nuance needs to be highlighted. Although they make up the largest national group among recorded foreign students, Haitians have the lowest average expenses among the nationalities examined by the BCRD.
The monthly average for all foreign students is $1,667.1, compared to $1,258.1 for Haitians. American students, on the other hand, have an average spend of $898 on studies and $1,499.5 on non-academic expenses, totaling $2,397.5 per month.
Overall, non-resident foreign students’ expenses generated about $44.5 million in revenue for the Dominican economy in 2024. Nearly three-quarters of this amount comes from non-academic spending. In the balance of payments methodology, these expenses are considered Dominican exports of travel services.The survey also shows that family living abroad is the main source of funding for the students surveyed. It covers 46.3% of the money spent on studies and 45.8% of that for non-academic expenses. Local families, jobs held in the Dominican Republic, scholarships, and international funding make up the rest of these resources.
However, these proportions concern all nationalities. They don’t allow us to say that families living in Haiti alone or mostly fund Haitian students’ expenses.
The country of origin of a transaction isn’t necessarily where the funds were originally generated.Some of the money sent from Haiti can come from locally earned income, savings held in dollars, or revenue from businesses and families engaged in cross-border activities. But some of the funds might also have been received earlier from the Haitian diaspora and then sent on to a student, a patient, or a relative living in the Dominican Republic.
The available statistics don’t allow us to separate these possibilities.
Beyond education, healthcare spending is another area. Haitian families pay for consultations, hospital stays, medicine, or recovery periods in the Dominican Republic. Housing, supporting relatives, migration procedures, and certain business activities can also require transfers that are higher than the usual remittances.The Haitian-Dominican border is crossed daily by flows of people, goods, and money, not all of which go through formal transfer companies.
Payments can be made in cash, entrusted to a relative, carried by merchants, or paid directly to a university, landlord, or healthcare facility. These transactions can escape official statistics on remittances.
So, the BCRD data provides a useful, but partial, snapshot of financial relations between the two countries. They allow us to measure transactions captured by Dominican reporting systems without necessarily accounting for all cross-border money movements.They also don’t specify, in the publications we looked at, the annual number of transactions coming from Haiti, their total amount, how they’re distributed by size, or the profile of the recipients. Without this information, it’s impossible to tell whether the average of $661.8 comes from a large number of fairly similar transfers or from a smaller group of big transactions.
It does, however, point to an economic reality that’s rarely documented: despite the collapse in activity, the scarcity of foreign currency, and the decrease in purchasing power, families and institutions based in Haiti continue to carry expensive obligations in the Dominican Republic.Behind the $661.8 per transaction are probably college fees, rent, food expenses, healthcare, and family responsibilities. So, the real lesson of the ranking isn’t about regained financial power, but about the rising cost of the human and economic ties that connect both sides of the island.
