How to send money from the UK to Kenya straight to M-Pesa

What you should not do is open your own UK bank app. Barclays and NatWest may charge you no fee, but that is not the whole price, because the rest is in the exchange rate. On £200 that part is about £5 at NatWest and £6 at Barclays.

HSBC charges a £5 fee online. Premier and Private Banking customers, and people who use a Global Money Account, do not pay the £5. HSBC says its rate also includes a currency conversion charge, so the £5 is not the whole cost. Lloyds charges a £9.50 fee and says its rate holds 3.55 percent, about £7 on £200, so close to £17 is gone, on a send that costs £2 to £3.60 through Sendwave or Remitly. Santander charges £25 for the transfer, plus 3 percent in the rate on this size of send, about £6. Its Edge accounts do not charge the £25. And the banks send to a Kenyan bank account, not to M-Pesa.

What £200 to Kenya M-Pesa actually costs, by app

• Wise uses the real exchange rate, shows the fee, and the money arrives in seconds. We could not get its price into an M-Pesa wallet, so read it in the app. To a Kenyan bank account it costs about £3.80 in total if you pay by bank transfer, and about £4.40 by debit card.
• Sendwave costs about £1.80 to £3 in total. It shows no fee, because the whole cost sits inside the exchange rate, about 0.9 to 1.5 percent off the real rate. Its rate moved that much within one day.
• WorldRemit does not show the fee until you type the amount in, so type £200 to see the total before you send. New customers get a promotional exchange rate on the first transfer.
• Remitly charges no fee to M-Pesa, unless you pay by credit card. Its usual rate is about 1.8 percent off the real rate, so about £3.60 on £200. New customers get a better rate on their first transfer, up to £600.
• Revolut sets its own exchange rate and adds a transfer fee. On the free plan the fee to a Kenyan bank account was a fixed £1.10 on 5 November. We could not get its price into an M-Pesa wallet, so read it in the app. Revolut widens the rate on shillings by another 1 percent from late Friday to late Sunday, so avoid sending then.

Sendwave and Remitly each deliver your £200 as close to 34,000 shillings in your recipient's M-Pesa wallet. These are the prices at the time of writing, and they move. The gap between those two is up to about £2 on £200. That is small enough that if you already have one of them installed, it is usually the right call.

Why sending straight to M-Pesa is cheaper

M-Pesa is not a bank account. It is a wallet on your recipient's Safaricom phone line. The person receiving on M-Pesa pays nothing to receive. All of the cost sits with the sender.

Wise, Sendwave, WorldRemit, Remitly and Revolut all turn pounds into shillings and put them straight into an M-Pesa wallet. Remitly and Revolut say the money arrives quickly. The other three say within minutes. Wise uses the real exchange rate. Sendwave, WorldRemit and Remitly use a rate close to it. Revolut sets its own rate. The real exchange rate is the one Google shows you when you search what the pound is worth in shillings.

The more expensive routes are your own bank, sending on the international bank system to Equity or KCB, and Western Union. The bank is slower too. For a routine send home, both are the wrong tool.

The apps that pay straight into M-Pesa

Wise uses the real exchange rate, and the money arrives in seconds. We could not get its price into an M-Pesa wallet, so read it in the app. To a Kenyan bank account, the fee is about £3.80 on £200 if you pay by bank transfer. Wise's own pages give two different limits for one transfer into an M-Pesa wallet: 150,000 shillings on one page and 250,000 shillings on another. If you are sending more than about £850, check the limit in your app first.

Sendwave shows no fee. The whole cost is inside the exchange rate, about 0.9 to 1.5 percent off the real rate, or about £1.80 to £3 on £200. Its rate moved that much within one day. On the numbers pulled for this piece, it was the cheaper of the two apps we could price into a wallet on a usual send. WorldRemit gave more shillings on a first transfer, but we could not price it after that. Sendwave is a simple app made for exactly this send. Some senders have had their account frozen while sending an ordinary amount and needed to call to unfreeze it.

WorldRemit puts the money into M-Pesa, usually in minutes, and new customers get a promotional exchange rate on the first transfer. The fee shape is not shown up front, so type the amount in to see the total before you send.

Remitly charges no fee to Kenya M-Pesa, unless you pay by credit card. Its usual rate is about 1.8 percent off the real rate, about £3.60 on £200. New customers get a better rate on their first transfer, up to £600. After that, the rate settles back, and it is worth checking against the others.

Revolut added direct M-Pesa payout in January 2024. It sets its own exchange rate and adds a transfer fee. On the free plan the fee to a Kenyan bank account was a fixed £1.10 on 5 November. We could not get its price into an M-Pesa wallet, so read it in the app before you send. The free plan also gives you £1,000 of currency exchange per month with no exchange fee; above that Revolut adds another 1 percent. Revolut also widens the rate on shillings by another 1 percent between late Friday evening and late Sunday evening UK time, so if you can, avoid sending during that window.

What to watch for

M-Pesa has a ceiling. A single M-Pesa transaction cannot be more than 250,000 shillings, about £1,400. A wallet cannot hold more than 500,000 shillings, about £2,850 at once. If you are sending school fees, a hospital bill, or a family harambee, and the number is bigger than that, you either split the send across days or send to a Kenyan bank account instead.

Money on M-Pesa is not yet cash. Your mother sees the shillings in her wallet the moment they arrive, but she cannot walk to an M-Pesa agent and take out physical cash until the agent opens. So if you send from London at 22:30, it is 01:30 in Nairobi, and the money is real, but she has to wait for an agent to open, unless there is a bank ATM nearby that supports M-Pesa withdrawal. Those ATMs cost a little more per withdrawal.

There is a withdrawal charge on her side, too. Safaricom charges a small fee when the recipient takes physical cash out at an agent. On a send of 20,000 to 35,000 shillings, roughly what £200 becomes, that charge is 197 shillings, about £1.10. The August 2026 M-Pesa fee cuts changed what shops pay to accept M-Pesa, not what she pays to withdraw. The 197 shilling agent charge is unchanged. It is not a big charge, but tell her about it so she is not surprised when the wallet reads less after she withdraws.

A "free" bank transfer is not free. If your UK bank app quotes zero fee on an international transfer, the cost is in the exchange rate. To check, open the bank app and one of the M-Pesa apps side by side, enter the same amount on the same day, and compare how many shillings arrive at the other end. That is the only number that matters.

The wallet may be Airtel Money, not M-Pesa. WorldRemit and Remitly pay into Airtel wallets too. Sendwave's site names M-Pesa and a bank account on this route. We could confirm what Airtel charges to move the money on only for small amounts.

When she moves the money on

The money arrives in her M-Pesa wallet with nothing taken off. The fee comes later, if she sends some of it on to another phone number. Safaricom charges by the amount she sends:

• 501 to 1,000 shillings: 13 shillings.
• 1,501 to 2,500 shillings: 33 shillings.
• 15,001 to 20,000 shillings: 105 shillings.
• More than 20,000 shillings: 108 shillings. That is the most a send costs.

So if she passes the whole £200, about 34,000 shillings, to her brother's wallet, it costs her 108 shillings, about 60p.

Airtel Money may charge the same. In July 2026 the Kenyan tech site Tech-ish tested sends from Airtel Money to M-Pesa and found the fee matched M-Pesa's on amounts up to 2,500 shillings. We could not confirm the fee above that, so on a bigger send she should read the fee Airtel shows her before she confirms. Tech-ish also reports that Airtel to Airtel is still free, but that rarely helps. M-Pesa has 88.8 percent of mobile money subscriptions in Kenya at the end of June 2026, on Communications Authority of Kenya figures.

Paying a bill direct costs her nothing or a small fee

PayBill is Safaricom's way of paying a business, such as Kenya Power. Each business chooses who pays the fee. On the setup called Customer Bouquet, the business pays and the customer pays nothing. On Business Bouquet, the customer pays. On Mgao, the two split the charge.

So if the money is for electricity, school fees, a hospital bill, an insurance premium, or rent to a landlord or agent who has a PayBill number, she can pay it straight from the wallet. She pays nothing or a small fee. On about 34,000 shillings, the most she pays is 83 shillings, against 108 shillings to send the money on. Before you send, ask her for the PayBill number and the account reference, so she can pay in one step when the SMS arrives.

It does not help with rent to a private landlord who has no PayBill number, or with money for everyday spending. Both are ordinary sends, so the fee above applies when she moves the money. For a bill she has not paid before, she can pay a little over 100 shillings first and check the receipt, because smaller payments show no fee.

For bigger one-off sends

For school fees, a medical bill, or any single send over about £1,400, M-Pesa on its own cannot carry the whole amount in one go. There are two options.

The first is to split the send across two days, staying under the 250,000 shilling per-transaction limit each time. It takes more taps. Which of the two options costs less changes with the day, so compare them.

The second is to send to a Kenyan bank account (Equity, KCB or Co-op). Wise, Remitly and WorldRemit do this. We could not get a price to a bank for Remitly or WorldRemit. The money arrives the same day or the next. Do not send from your own UK bank on the international bank system: the fee will look free or small, and the exchange rate will not be.

What to open

Corrections

• 2026-11-05: An earlier version of this guide said the cheapest way to send money from the UK to Kenya is straight into M-Pesa. On 5 November Instarem, which pays only to a Kenyan bank account, cost less than every price we read into a wallet, so the guide no longer says that, and it now says how to send straight into M-Pesa. It said Wise and Remitly send to a Kenyan bank at a similar cost per pound. We could not get a Remitly price to a bank, so that line is gone. It said Revolut says within minutes. Revolut says quickly, so the guide now says that. It said Sendwave pays only into M-Pesa or a bank account. Sendwave's price data lists an Airtel option, so the guide now says only what Sendwave's site names. It said Remitly charges no fee, with no exception. Remitly says the no-fee does not apply if you pay by credit card, so the guide now says so.
• 2026-11-05: An earlier version of this guide gave about £3.80 and about £4.40 as Wise's cost into an M-Pesa wallet, included Wise in the £2 to £4.50 range, and said Wise delivers close to 34,000 shillings into the wallet. Those were Wise's prices to a Kenyan bank account and no public Wise source prices a wallet, so they are now labelled as bank prices, the range is about £2 to £3.60 through Sendwave or Remitly, and the cheapest line and the gap now compare those two.
• 2026-11-05: An earlier version of this guide said Revolut shows its price only in the app, that it alone does not price close to the real rate, that its £1,000 a month on the free plan is at close to the real rate, and that its fee to Kenya is small. Revolut sets its own rate and its fee to a Kenyan bank account was a fixed £1.10 on 5 November, so the guide now says that, and says we could not get its price into a wallet.
• 2026-11-05: An earlier version of this guide said a UK bank app may not show you its exchange rate, that the cost is hidden, and that Barclays and NatWest will show no fee on the transfer screen. NatWest, Barclays and Lloyds say they show the rate before you confirm, and we did not see the screen, so these lines are gone. It also said Santander adds 1 to 3 percent in the rate. On a send of this size it adds 3 percent, about £6.
• 2026-11-04: An earlier version of this guide said Sendwave costs about £1.80 on £200, about 0.9 percent off the real rate, and that the gap between the apps is about £2. Sendwave's rate moved through a wider range within one day, so the guide now gives about £1.80 to £3 and a gap of up to about £2. It also called splitting a big send across two days the cheapest way. Which option costs less changes with the day, so the guide no longer says that.
• 2026-11-04: On 2026-11-01 we took HSBC's £5 fee out of this guide. That was wrong. HSBC charges £5 online unless you are a Premier or Private Banking customer or use a Global Money Account, and the guide now says so. It also put HSBC's hidden cost on £200 at about £4. HSBC has two exchange rates and we could not tell which one that figure used, so the guide no longer gives it, and the bank range is now about £5 to £7 at NatWest, Barclays and Lloyds. On the same date we said only the Edge account at Santander has no fee. Edge, Edge Explorer and Edge Up all waive it, and the guide no longer says "most" Santander accounts charge £25. An earlier version said Western Union is slower than the apps and pushes you toward a cash agent. Western Union says it can pay in minutes and pays into M-Pesa, so the guide now says only that it costs more. It called Sendwave the cheapest of the apps that show a price before you sign up. WorldRemit shows a price too, and gave more shillings on a first transfer, so Sendwave is now the cheapest of the three apps we could price on a usual send. It gave one price range for all five apps and said the cheapest way is one of them. We could price three, and another app, NALA, showed a slightly better rate, so the range now names those three and the guide says only that the cheapest route is straight into M-Pesa. It said most agents keep shop hours, that money can wait until about 07:00, and that Equity, KCB and Co-op Bank ATMs work at any hour. We could not source those lines, so they are gone.
• 2026-11-04: An earlier version of this guide said nearly every Kenyan family has an M-Pesa wallet, almost every family uses M-Pesa, and most household bills are paid through PayBill. No current source counts any of these, so the guide now gives M-Pesa's share of mobile money subscriptions and no longer makes the other two claims.
• 2026-11-04: An earlier version of this guide said paying a bill by PayBill costs nothing extra, that the business pays the fee on the usual setup, and that Kenya Power, the big banks, most private schools and most hospitals and clinics are on that setup. Safaricom has three setups and each business chooses one. No source shows who chose what, so the guide now says she pays nothing or a small fee. It said to test a new bill with a small amount, but payments of 100 shillings or less show no fee, so the test is now a little over that. It gave Bila Malipo as another name for the setup. We found no Safaricom source for that name, so it is gone from the guide and from the 2026-07-19 note below. It said some sending apps can pay a PayBill number from the UK. We could not confirm that on any app's own page, so that line is gone.
• 2026-11-04: An earlier version of this guide said Airtel Money has charged the same as M-Pesa since 15 July 2026, that no wallet is cheaper, and that WorldRemit and Remitly pay into Airtel at the same cost as M-Pesa. We could not confirm Airtel's charges from Airtel. One press test covers amounts up to 2,500 shillings, so the guide now says only that. It said Remitly gives new customers about 172 shillings per pound. That is now close to Remitly's usual rate, so the guide no longer gives a number. It put the M-Pesa limits at about £1,450 and about £2,900. Those figures were rounded up past the real limits, and are now about £1,400 and about £2,850. It put Wise's limit into an M-Pesa wallet at about £860 in one transfer and said to split a bigger send. Wise's own pages give two different limits, 150,000 and 250,000 shillings, so the guide now gives both and says to check the limit in the app above about £850. It said all the apps deliver in seconds, and WorldRemit in under two minutes. WorldRemit says minutes and Remitly says only quickly, so the guide now says that.
• 2026-07-19: The PayBill section of this guide comes from our earlier page on Kenya mobile money fees, which is now part of this guide. An earlier version of that page named "Business Bouquet" as the PayBill setup where the business pays the fee and the customer pays nothing. Safaricom calls that setup Customer Bouquet; Business Bouquet is the opposite. The same page also said Airtel's charges above 2,500 shillings had been tested; they had only been tested up to 2,500.
• 2026-11-01: An earlier version of this guide said Santander shows no fee on a transfer to Kenya. Most Santander accounts charge £25 for an international payment, plus 1 to 3 percent in the exchange rate. Only the Edge account has no fee. It also said Sendwave pays into Airtel Money in Kenya. On this route Sendwave pays only into M-Pesa or a bank account. It said HSBC shows a £5 fee and that Revolut's fee to Kenya is 0.75 percent with a £1 minimum. Neither could be confirmed from a current source, so the guide now gives HSBC's cost in the exchange rate and says Revolut shows its fee in the app. The app prices on this page were also brought up to date, because they had moved with the market.
• 2026-11-01: An earlier version of this guide said the cut to what shops pay to accept M-Pesa came on 1 August 2026. The 1 August change was to Pochi la Biashara, the number small traders use. Safaricom announced the cut to what shops pay separately in August 2026 and did not give a day for it.