On a SWIFT wire transfer, the SHA, OUR, and BEN fee instructions tell every bank in the payment chain who absorbs the charges. OUR means you, the sender, pay everything: your bank’s fee, every intermediary’s fee, and the receiving bank’s fee. SHA splits the cost, with you paying your bank and the recipient paying theirs while intermediaries deduct from the transfer amount. BEN pushes all charges onto the recipient, who receives whatever is left after each bank in the chain takes its cut. Picking the wrong one can shortchange your recipient by $50 or more, or leave you paying costs you didn’t plan for.
Why the Choice Matters
An international wire rarely moves directly from your bank to the recipient’s bank. Most payments pass through one to three correspondent banks that bridge gaps between financial systems in different countries. A bank in Chicago might not have a direct relationship with a small bank in Warsaw, so it routes the payment through a larger institution that does. Each stop along the way charges a processing fee, commonly $15 to $50 per institution.
Those intermediary charges are what the three fee codes actually allocate. If only two banks were involved, the split would be trivial. Once several institutions handle the same payment, the code you select decides whether each one deducts from the funds in transit or bills one of the endpoints instead.
OUR: You Pay Every Fee in the Chain
Selecting OUR means you absorb every charge the transfer generates, from your own bank’s outgoing fee through every intermediary and the recipient’s bank. Your recipient receives the exact amount you specified, with no deductions along the way.
Your bank estimates the total downstream costs at the time you initiate the transfer and charges you upfront. Those estimates are not always exact. If actual intermediary fees come in lower, some banks refund the difference and others keep it. If costs run higher, a few banks will bill you afterward, though many absorb the shortfall rather than surprise you. The upfront price of an OUR transfer runs noticeably higher than SHA or BEN because your bank is taking on pricing risk for institutions it does not control.
OUR is the standard choice when a contract, invoice, or legal settlement requires the recipient to receive a precise amount. It is also common for payroll to international employees and payments to vendors who insist on receiving full invoice value. If you owe $25,000 on an agreement that says “$25,000 due upon delivery,” sending SHA and letting $40 vanish along the way creates an underpayment problem you will need to clean up later.
SHA: Each Side Pays Its Own Bank
SHA splits the cost. You pay your bank’s outgoing wire fee, the recipient pays whatever their bank charges for receiving funds, and any intermediary fees in the middle of the chain come out of the transfer amount itself. The recipient gets slightly less than you sent.
This is the default for most commercial transactions and the most commonly used charge code worldwide. Send $10,000 with a SHA instruction and your bank charges its outgoing wire fee separately, while the recipient might see $9,940 to $9,970 arrive depending on how many intermediaries handled the payment and what each one charged. The deductions are unpredictable because you typically do not know in advance how many intermediaries will be involved or what their fee schedules look like.
SHA works well when both parties accept that transfer costs are a normal cost of doing business and neither side has contractual leverage to push all fees onto the other. It is the path of least resistance for routine supplier payments, intercompany transfers, and any situation where a few dollars of variance in the received amount will not trigger a dispute.
BEN: The Recipient Pays Everything
BEN shifts all costs to the recipient. Your bank, every intermediary, and the receiving bank deduct their fees from the transfer amount before it arrives. You pay nothing beyond the principal.
The total deduction under BEN can be substantial. Every institution in the chain takes its cut from the funds in transit, and the recipient has no way to predict the total reduction until the money arrives. On a payment routed through two intermediaries, the recipient might see $50 to $100 or more deducted from the expected amount. This makes BEN unpopular with recipients for obvious reasons, and it has grown rare in practice.
BEN shows up most often in specific private arrangements where the recipient has agreed to bear all transfer costs, such as when a parent company funds a subsidiary and does not want to deal with separate fee processing. Before selecting it, check whether your bank still offers it. Many institutions have quietly dropped BEN as an option, and regulatory changes in major markets have made it unavailable for entire categories of transfers.
Sending Within the EEA: SHA Is Mandatory
If you are sending money within the European Economic Area, the choice largely disappears. The EU’s Payment Services Directive (PSD2) requires that intra-EEA payment transactions use the SHA model: the sender pays charges levied by the sender’s bank, and the recipient pays charges levied by the recipient’s bank. This applies to all EEA currencies, whether or not a currency conversion is involved.1European Banking Federation. PSD2 Guidance
PSD2 also enforces a “full amount” principle. Intermediary banks cannot deduct fees from the transfer amount on intra-EEA payments, so the recipient must receive the full sum sent, with any charges shown separately. This is a significant departure from how SHA works on transfers outside the EEA, where intermediary deductions are standard. Sending euros from one EEA country to another, OUR and BEN are not available. For transfers going into or out of the EEA to non-EEA countries, all three charge codes remain available.
What the Fee Code Does Not Cover
The instruction you select controls explicit processing charges. It does nothing about exchange rate markups, which are often the largest cost in an international transfer and the easiest to overlook.
When your transfer involves a currency conversion, the bank handling the conversion applies its own exchange rate rather than the mid-market rate you would see on a financial news site. The gap between the two rates is the bank’s markup, typically 1% to 5% depending on the institution, the currency pair, and the size of the transfer. On a $10,000 payment, a 3% markup costs $300, which dwarfs the $25 or $40 you might pay in explicit wire fees. This cost applies regardless of whether you chose OUR, SHA, or BEN.
Some banks let you lock in an exchange rate before sending. Others convert at whatever rate applies when the transfer is processed, which could be hours or days later. On larger amounts, asking your bank for the specific rate they will apply before you authorize the transfer can save real money. You can compare the quoted rate against the mid-market rate on any financial data site to see exactly how much the bank is taking.
h2>Where to Select the Code
In the traditional SWIFT MT103 message format, the fee instruction lives in Field 71A, labeled “Details of Charges.” You enter one of the three codes: OUR, SHA, or BEN. Every bank in the payment chain reads this field to know how to handle its fees.2Deutsche Bank. Payments Formatting Guide
If you are sending a wire through an online banking portal, you will typically find the option in a dropdown labeled “Fees,” “Charges,” or “Payment Details.” Some banks default to SHA and require you to actively change it if you want OUR or BEN. Others show all three options with brief descriptions. If you do not see a charge selection at all, your bank is likely applying SHA automatically.
As of November 2025, SWIFT requires cross-border payment instructions between financial institutions to use the ISO 20022 messaging format, with the MT103 message replaced by the pacs.008 message type.3SWIFT. ISO 20022 End of Coexistence The OUR, SHA, and BEN codes carry over into the new format unchanged, so as a sender you will still see the same three options in your banking portal.
Which One to Pick
The decision usually comes down to three questions. Does your contract specify who pays fees? Does the recipient need to receive an exact amount? And do both parties have a banking relationship comfortable handling their own charges?
- Use OUR when a contract, invoice, or legal obligation requires the recipient to get a specific amount. The extra cost is modest compared to the hassle of an underpayment dispute.
- Use SHA for routine business payments where both sides accept normal banking costs. It is the default for a reason: fair, predictable, and universally supported.
- Use BEN only when you have a specific agreement that the recipient will cover all costs, and after confirming your bank still offers it.
Sending to the EEA in an EEA currency, SHA is your only option regardless of preference. For everything else, when in doubt, SHA is the safe middle ground that will not surprise either party.