PayPal is one of the most widely used payment processors in the world, especially for freelancers, e-commerce businesses, and creators. But when it comes to withdrawing money—particularly in USD from European PayPal accounts—things get complicated quickly. PayPal’s default behavior is to convert your balance into your local currency (usually EUR) before withdrawing, and their exchange rates are notoriously unfavorable. In this updated guide, I’ll show you the most efficient ways to withdraw your funds while minimizing or avoiding unnecessary fees and bad conversion rates.

As discussed in previous posts, once you’re using PayPal to sell your stuff online, you will also want to eventually withdraw the money you make into your bank account so that you can actually use it. Here’s where things get a bit nasty, unfortunately.

If you have a US bank account and a US PayPal account, you can stop reading right here. You’re in luck. All you have to do is attach your bank account to your PayPal account and withdraw USD from your PayPal account to your bank account. There are no currency conversions to worry about, and the transfer itself is free from PayPal’s side.

If you are the owner of a non-US PayPal account and you don’t have a US bank account, things are not so pretty.

You are given two options (depending on your home country, it might even be just one option):

1. Withdraw to a debit or credit card
2. Withdraw to your local bank account.

If you sell online you probably use USD as the main currency on your store and hence your PayPal balance will be in USD. What happens is that since your local credit card or bank account are not in USD, an automatic currency conversion takes place on PayPal’s end as the money is on the way out. The conversion rates are bad, to put it mildly. Hence you’re going to lose a lot of money on that conversion.

Withdrawing your funds from PayPal to a debit or credit card can be annoying if you have significant funds. The reason is that you can only withdraw a limited amount ($2,500 – $10,000 depending on your account status) at one go, and every time you make a withdrawal you are charged $2,50.

So let’s say you need to withdraw $50,000. You will need to go through the withdrawal process 20 times (with a limit of $2,500 set for your account) for a total cost of $60. This sounds ridiculous; a time-wasting activity and also a money-grab by PayPal. It is, there’s no other way of looking at it.

The other way of withdrawing is to send the funds directly to your bank account. There are no limits when compared to withdrawing to a card. Sounds like we solved our problem right?

Well, not so fast.

If your bank account is in a different currency than the funds you have stored on PayPal, be prepared to lose a significant amount of money due to PayPal’s horrible exchange rates. PayPal does not let you send, say, USD directly to a EUR-denominated account. This is a limitation on their end, and I suspect an intentional one to fleece their users. There are no such limitations when using other payment gateways such as 2Checkout.

So let’s get back to the $50,000 example. Let’s see what PayPal is ready to offer us in Euros:

So for $50,000 PayPal will offer us €43,338. On the other hand, using the rate from a local bank, I get a significant difference: €43,775. And that’s just a local old-fashioned bank, not one of the dedicated currency conversion companies like Wise.

Wise would, in fact, give us €44,378, more than a €1,000 difference compared to PayPal, while Currencyfair would give us ¢44,332, which is also significantly better than PayPal.

I personally find it unacceptable to drop a thousand euros like that. This is why I will continue to withdraw using the silly method of withdrawing $2,500 at a time, simply because the total cost is still much lower. Using that method, as I showed you in another post, you can get PayPal to send USD directly to your credit card, whatever its currency.

Before we continue, it would be a good move on your end to check whether other services like Wise or Revolut would be an even better fit for you than PayPal. In general, I recommend trying to find an alternative to using PayPal for whatever you are trying to do, since PayPal has terrible customer support and charges high fees.

Withdrawing to Cards

In the case of cards, you can ask PayPal to switch off automatic currency conversion, and have the conversion happen on your bank’s side, which will give you a better rate. I wrote about how to do this in my earlier post on currency conversion and PayPal.

The funds arrive at your bank in USD, bypassing PayPal’s currency conversion entirely. This means your bank performs the conversion (if needed), often at a significantly better rate.

The earlier $2,500 limit no longer appears to apply universally. With my Wise USD Visa, I was able to withdraw up to $3,000 in a single transaction. With my local bank’s card, the limit was $10,000 per withdrawal. These amounts may vary depending on account age, history, and the card issuer, so your experience might differ slightly.

While there is still a $2.50 fee per card withdrawal, avoiding PayPal’s FX rate more than makes up for it if you’re moving substantial sums. This method is currently the most cost-effective way to preserve your PayPal USD earnings within the European banking ecosystem.

If your bank does not provide good conversion rates, consider using digital banks such as Revolut, Wise, and N26, which often offer much better FX rates and USD balance support. Opening an account with these platforms is free and typically very fast.

Withdrawing with no currency conversion at either end: I have lately been successfully withdrawing USD from my European PayPal account directly to my Wise USD Visa card. The funds arrived in full, in USD, with no currency conversion applied at either end. This confirms that it’s possible to preserve the original currency entirely when withdrawing to a properly configured USD card, making Wise one of the best options currently available for this use case.

Buying Crypto with PayPal

Another compelling strategy in 2025 is to buy cryptocurrency directly using your PayPal balance instead of withdrawing to a bank account or card. This approach avoids both withdrawal fees and PayPal’s unfavorable currency conversion altogether.

Several crypto platforms, including Binance, now support PayPal deposits. That means you can use your USD PayPal balance to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other crypto assets instantly. This method is ideal for those looking to stack crypto over time and bypass the traditional banking layers completely.

As always, be cautious when converting large sums and use reputable exchanges. But if you’re crypto-savvy and bullish long-term, this route can be both profitable and efficient.

You can also read my full review of Binance to learn more about this crypto exchange.

Buy Bitcoin with Binance

This withdrawal method is extremely popular at the moment, as people worldwide seek to get themselves some Bitcoin or Ethereum due to their excellent future price prospects.

Withdrawing to a Local Bank Account

Withdrawing to a local bank account does not present any limits, so you can pull out that $100k without any problems at one go, however, you will be hit by PayPal’s bad exchange rate plus currency conversion charges. It is usually easy to open a USD account with your local bank, the big problem is that PayPal will not allow you to transfer USD from your PayPal balance into your local USD account if you are based in Europe, as they consider all European bank accounts as Euro-based.

Note that in April 2020 I was able to add a USD account to my PayPal business account, so there seems to be a way to get a non-Euro bank account added. I had to ask PayPal to add it manually, as the link in the dashboard did not let me do it. I will be testing a few withdrawals with this method and will update the section below if I see that it becomes more advantageous to withdraw to the USD bank account instead of the debit card.

Real Example – Withdrawing to Card vs Local Bank Account

As an example at the time of writing this article, if you transferred $10k out of PayPal via a bank transfer to a local bank in Malta (the country where my bank is account is located in), you would have ultimately received €8,839 in the bank account. My bank does not charge any fees for currency conversion.

On the other hand, if you were to withdraw that same $10k out of PayPal to a debit/credit card linked to the same account, you would get €8,911. That amount is after deducting PayPal’s card withdrawal charge ($2.50/€2 per withdrawal, up to a max of $2,500 per withdrawal; hence four withdrawals would be needed in this case to get $10k out).

The local bank was using 0.8921 as the exchange rate between USD and EUR.

PayPal, on the other hand, was using 0.8839, a significantly different rate.

PayPal includes the charges within the exchange rate, so if you accuse them of having a really bad exchange rate their excuse will be that it includes the currency conversion fees.

At the end of the day then, we would be better off when withdrawing to a card by €72. 

Not that small of an amount, especially if you start considering transferring higher amounts. The difference would be around €700 on a $100k transfer, which is ridiculous.

Other Options

The difficulties detailed above affect every country in the world except for Canada. In Canada, users have found a loophole that allows them to perform USD to USD transfers without any charges. See here and here. Once again I had this confirmed by a PayPal support agent, as can be seen in the email excerpt below:

While not being familiar with all of our 200+ countries’ user agreements, I am fairly confident saying that Canada is the only country we have with an exception that allows a local USD denominated bank to be added and used.

I believe this is also related to how the US and Canadian bank network is cooperating. Regardless, this is not something we offer to a Maltese account, other than if you had an actual bank account registered in the US to withdraw USD to.

There are some other options one could explore:

1. Open a non-resident Canadian bank account with RBC
2. Open a Canadian PayPal account connected with an HSBC bank account in Malta
3. Use Etrade
4. Open a US bank account

Opening a Canadian bank account with RBS is easier than opening a US bank account. I don’t have much experience in this area except checking if it’s possible and confirming that it is. What one would do then is use the routing number of that bank account to add it as a US bank account within PayPal and withdraw money into the RBS account. Then one would use Wise to transfer the funds to a Maltese bank account. I am still checking to confirm 100% whether PayPal would allow this setup on a Maltese bank account or not.

Opening an Etrade account and withdrawing money to it is also another option that I’ve seen being discussed, and again I need to look into it in more detail.

The last option would, of course, be to open a USD account with a US bank, something that is easier said than done. Usually, a Social Security Number (SSN) is required, however, some banks allow you to open an account without it when visiting the branch in the US. There might still be limitations though (for example, no bank transfers possible) which would limit the practicality of such an account for my particular desired usage. Some people have also asked me whether it is possible to open a US bank account for their non-US company. As far as I know this is impossible unless you are going to deposit a few million dollars into that account.

If you have found a solution I’d love to know how you managed, please go ahead and leave a comment!