I’ve already written about how to avoid losing money from PayPal’s disadvantageous exchange rates when withdrawing money from your PayPal account to your local bank account, but in this post, I will be showing the exact process that is used at this point in time (June 2014) for anyone who wants to do the same. Unfortunately, you won’t find this information anywhere on PayPal’s website, so I had to figure things out myself by contacting their support staff.
First of all, a quick explanation of why I wanted to change my withdrawal currency. My local bank accounts are in Euro and since my business is based in Malta I am only allowed to withdraw money to the credit card issued by my bank or to a Euro bank account.
Sadly there is no option to have a credit card account in USD. Therefore what was happening was that whenever I withdraw from PayPal (where most of my funds are in USD), the PayPal system would automatically convert from USD to EUR to match my local bank account. The problem is that the rates PayPal uses are much worse than the conversion rates at my local bank. So I wanted the conversion to happen on the bank’s side rather than PayPal’s.
Luckily it turns out to be easy to do. All you need to do is notify PayPal manually that you want that particular credit card to receive USD rather than EUR, and you can do this by opening a support ticket from PayPal’s website. Below I am reproducing the reply I got from PayPal when I asked them to change my withdrawal currency:
Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding questions about the withdrawal options for your Business account in Malta.
For bank withdrawals, you can only add a US bank account to your Business account, and then withdraw your PayPal USD balance to there.
For credit card withdrawals into USD, we can change the currency for your cards added to your account into USD on your request. If you wish to do this, please confirm the last 4 digits of the card that you want to be changed to USD and we will then update this in our system. This will also resolve any currency conversion loss for you when making withdrawals.
Another annoying thing for me is the $2,500 limit for every withdrawal. There is a charge for every transaction, so it is not only inconvenient to be limited in this way, but I am also getting charged for multiple transactions when I could have more easily done one. Sadly there isn’t a solution to this latter issue. This is what the PayPal support rep had to say about my query in this regard:
Regarding your question about the 2500 USD withdrawal limit per transaction, I confirm that all withdrawal limits are overridden on your account from PayPal´s side. The 2500 USD withdrawal limit is a worldwide regulation on VISA´s side, so I regret that we cannot lift this limit. However, you can make as many withdrawals per day as you want, as long as they don´t exceed 2500 USD per transaction.
I hope this post helps clear things further for those of you who have asked me how to perform this little trick and save money on your withdrawals.
Note: If you have any questions after reading this and the several other articles relating to PayPal on this site, please leave a comment or contact PayPal directly. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I am unable to offer any advice over email so all emails related to PayPal will remain unanswered.
I also tried a few times to get PayPal to allow me to withdraw USD into a British USD account, but they refused and said it’s part of their policy to not allow withdrawals for anything other than GBP! Yet another reason to hate PayPal!
https://www.paypal.com/hk/smarthelp/article/can-i-withdraw-funds-from-my-paypal-balance-into-my-credit-or-debit-card-faq859
Withdrawing funds into credit card is not allowed anymore? I just found this on Paypal
I contacted PayPal support on two occasions now, they keep on insisting it can’t be done in the UK.
I live in pakistan and i play games which needs paypal account but i have no account then please tell the other easy way how i withdrawal money in pakistan
This is an utter disgrace. This article suggests the fees can be by-passed.
https://wise.com/gb/blog/how-to-send-money-from-paypal-to-transferwise
I’m hitting PayPal from all angles. This surely cannot be legal … it’s extortion.
They claim the 3% fee is due to their cross-border policy, but I have a USD account with a UK bank with a UK sort-code and account number. So, it’s not cross-border, and there is no conversion necessary.
So, guess what? They block it!
It’s extortion, plain and simple, and we should bombard their Twitter feed, @AskPayPal.
I’m also going to report them to the financial ombudsman, and go at them with mainstream media, social media, and everything I can hit them with.
The little guys can win if we do it together.
They told today they have a new policy (October 2o20) for Automatic Withdrawals where they force your local currency regardless of your primary currency or card currency.
My account is Egyptian… but my primary currency is EUR and I have added a EUR VISA card for withdrawals.
They forced my clients to pay in their local currency (SAR) then converted to EUR (taking more than 2.5% from the client) then they took from me around 4.8%… then they will take another 2.5% to force converting to EGP for withdrawal.
That’s a total of more than 10% for PayPal !
And I’ll still have to pay another 3% for my Card Bank as they will convert EGP back to EUR!
Yeah – Paypal fees have become extortionate. I used to at least be able to avoid the exchange fee by withdrawing to a USD bank account. Now they want to charge me 3% to withdraw to the same account – no currency conversion taking place.
I have already started avoiding using Paypal as much as possible and moved the bulk of my business to another payment provider, but with these policies I think it is time to actively boycott them and warn others of their extortionate fees. There is no justification for them taking such large fees at multiple points in the transaction from receiving to withdrawing.
Hello
i am also stuck in this extortionate policy
they take 4.4% and now they want to take 3% to send me SAR and I have USD card
I contacted them through chat and they weren’t willing to help at first.
I kept insisting until they called me on my phone and told me they will try!
Then, I was surprised that the auto-withdraw was made in EUR as I requested and no more fees were deducted.
So, everyone should keep trying hard and never give up.
I am at a new bank. How do I change this on PayPal?
I want To know how long in payopal
After changing my (invalid) card currency to USD I started to have new problem now, they are doing force conversion from USD to GBP during automated refund from payments!
I’m starting too loose ideas how to deal with that crap, because when you receive refund and they auto convert I don’t even have any options there!