Remittances: the net that holds but does not lift

• Over a decade, they rose from 17% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)Footnote 1^[1] to 30% in 2025 (USD 12.2 billion)Footnote 2^[2].
• The number of households receiving remittances also increasedFootnote 3^[3]: from at least 346,000 in 2015 to 670,000 in 2025 (one quarter of all households) (Figure 1).
  • These could be conservative estimates: according to the Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH) 2023–2024, the share of recipient households may reach 38%Footnote 4^[4].
• The largest change is in rural areas, where the share of recipient households rose by more than 9 percentage points since 2015 (Figure 1).

• They account for more than one fifth of total income in these householdsFootnote 5^[5] (Figure 2).
• More than 16%Footnote 6^[6] of recipient households obtain at least 75% of their income from remittances (Figure 3).
• In the most extreme cases, around 10% of households depend almost entirely on these transfersFootnote 7^[7] (Figure 3).

• In 2015, more than half of recipient households were in the two highest income quintiles; by 2025 that share had fallen to 43%. In contrast, the share of recipients in the two lowest quintiles rose from 26% to 37% (Figure 4).
• Although the largest share of remittances remains concentrated in the highest quintileFootnote 8^[8], its share fell from 42% to 30% (Figure 5)Footnote 9^[9].
• While lower-income households receive smaller amounts, remittances account for a substantially larger share of their total incomeFootnote 10^[10]. In the first quintile, they represented half of total income in 2025 (Figure 6).

• In 2025, 4 in 10 recipient households were headed by someone aged 60 or older, up from 3 in 10 in 2015 (Figure 7)Footnote 11^[11].

• Educational progress is limited. While the national data show an increase in tertiary educationFootnote 12^[12], recipient households show signs of stagnation — and even a slight rise in the share with no formal educationFootnote 13^[13] (Table 1).
• A gap with the national average persists in the labor market, with a lower share of employed adults and a higher share outside the labor forceFootnote 14^[14] (Table 1).
• By occupation, adults in recipient households are less concentrated in agriculture and more concentrated in services (Table 1).

• For all households, a scenario without remittancesFootnote 15^[15] would raise the monetary poverty rateFootnote 16^[16] by 3 percentage points in both 2015 and 2025Footnote 17^[17] (Figures 8 and 9).
• Among recipient households, the absence of remittances would push the monetary poverty rate up by 17 percentage points in 2015 and 12 percentage points in 2025 (Figures 10 and 11).
• In both years, this increase is driven mainly by a rise in the extreme poverty rate — 20 percentage points in 2015 and 17 percentage points in 2025 (Figures 10 and 11).

• In 2015, 30% of recipient households would have seen their poverty status worsen in the absence of remittances; by 2025 that share had fallen to 23% (Figure 12).
  • This suggests their protective capacity has weakened despite reaching more vulnerable households, amounts remain insufficient and most of the flow is still concentrated in the higher quintilesFootnote 18^[18].
• The most common transition is from moderate to extreme poverty, affecting 13% of households in 2015 and 11% in 2025Footnote 2^[2] (Figure 12).

• In 2025, remittances reached record levels, but whether they keep flowing depends above all on conditions in the destination countries. Those most dependent on them are precisely those with the fewest options to absorb a potential drop.
• Reducing that exposure by increasing labor force participation in recipient households seems the obvious path. Designing a concrete strategy, however, requires a better understanding of the incentives remittances create for recipients, and an updated profile of recent migration flows.

If you work on remittance analysis or policy design, we'd like to hear from you. Contact us at econ@sendas.org