Wise Review 2026: Three Years of Fees, Cards and Limits

I have been moving my own money through Wise for a bit over three years. Not testing it for a review — using it: paying by card in countries whose currency I do not hold, converting euros into dollars on days when the rate looks reasonable rather than on days when I need the dollars, receiving client payments by SWIFT and SEPA, and running a Georgian sole proprietorship through Wise Business. This article is what three years of that taught me, with every number re-checked against Wise’s own pricing and help pages in August 2026.

It is also the first article on this site that is not about bitcoin or ether, and it needs one sentence of justification. Currency conversion is the boring layer underneath everything else here: if you buy on a schedule, the euros have to become dollars before they become anything else, and a 3% spread on that leg is a 3% loss that never appears on any statement as a line item. Wise is the tool I use for that layer, so it gets the same treatment as everything else on the site — numbers instead of adjectives, and a section listing what is wrong with it.

Three years of it, and the honest headline is that there is nothing dramatic to report. That is a real data point and also a small one: one person, one usage pattern, in countries where Wise works well. Where my own experience runs out, this article says so and quotes Wise instead. I write and run the whole of this site myself, which is the same reason the disclosure below is longer than usual.

Disclosure: this article contains a referral link to Wise. If you open an account through it you get a signup bonus — currently a free card or one fee-free transfer, depending on your region — and this site receives a referral reward. It costs you nothing: the pricing and the product are identical whether you use the link or type wise.com into your browser. Wise did not commission this article, did not see it before publication and has no say over its contents, including the section on what I do not like.

Short version: Wise gives you the mid-market exchange rate with the fee charged separately and shown before you confirm — from 0.33% on a common pair started in the UK, 0.53% as the average price across all currencies in Q1 2026 — and a card that converts automatically at that same rate with no extra card markup. It is not a bank: an ordinary balance is safeguarded, not deposit-insured, so no FSCS and no FDIC on the money you spend from. In three years I have had no block, no freeze and no lost payment, which is one person’s record rather than a guarantee — compliance freezes do happen to other people. The two gaps that matter most to me are geographic: the country my business sits in gets the account but neither the card nor the interest product.

If that is enough to decide on, opening an account through my referral link gets you the signup bonus described at the end, and gets this site a reward for the introduction. Everything between here and there is the detail, including the reasons not to.

What Wise is (and what it is not)

Wise started in 2011 as TransferWise and is now a public company listed on Nasdaq. In the year to 31 March 2026 it reported 19 million active customers and $39.0 billion of customer holdings — cash and investments combined — at an average take rate of 0.52%, the share of the money it moved that Wise kept as revenue. It is large, listed and profitable, and none of that makes it a bank, which is the most important sentence in this article.

What it holds instead of a banking licence is an electronic money institution licence — permission to hold and move your money, but not to lend it out and not to call it a deposit. Wise Payments Ltd has the UK version from the FCA, firm reference 900507, and the group is licensed as an e-money or payments business in the UK, the EU, the US, Australia, Singapore, Canada and Japan — and not one of those licences is a deposit guarantee.

What happens to your balance instead is called safeguarding. Wise does not lend it out; it holds it apart from its own money, in accounts at Barclays, Citibank, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank among others, and in government bonds maturing in under three years. If Wise failed, that pot is meant to be returned to customers ahead of other creditors. Wise states the limit of this plainly on its own help pages: the money is not subject to the FSCS. A UK bank deposit is covered to £120,000 by the FSCS — the limit rose from £85,000 on 1 December 2025 — and a US one to $250,000 by the FDIC. A Wise balance is covered by neither scheme.

So, is Wise safe? The honest answer has two halves and you need both. It is a regulated, listed company whose customer money is ring-fenced from its own, and it is plumbed directly into the payment system rather than renting someone else’s licence — it is a direct participant in the UK’s Faster Payments and was the first non-bank to be given a settlement account at the Bank of England, back in 2018. And it is not a deposit-taking institution, which means the failure mode and the protection are both different from a bank’s. I treat it as money in motion, not as the place where savings sit.

The card while travelling

The card costs 7 GBP, 7 EUR or 9 USD once, depending on where you are, and nothing thereafter: no monthly fee, no minimum, and digital cards are free. That is the whole cost of ownership, which is worth saying because travel cards are the product category where the fee schedule usually starts rather than ends at issuance.

Spending works in two cases. If you hold the currency you are paying in, the fee is zero. If you do not, the card converts automatically from your cheapest balance at the ordinary conversion fee — and there is no separate card markup stacked on top of it, which is the specific thing most bank cards get wrong. In practice this is the feature I use hardest: I keep euros and dollars, land somewhere with neither, and pay anyway. The transaction shows up converted at the mid-market rate with the fee itemised, and in three years I have never had to reconstruct afterwards what the exchange rate on a purchase actually was.

Cash is where the fine print lives. Since 1 May 2026 the free ATM allowance is a monthly amount set by the country that issued your card, not the country you are standing in — 250 EUR, 250 GBP or 250 USD in most regions, 400 AUD in Australia, 25,000 JPY in Japan — and it resets on the 1st of each month. Above the allowance the eurozone and the UK charge 2.69% on the amount over it; the US charges $1.95 plus 1.95% on each full withdrawal past the threshold, which is a harsher rule than it looks, because it prices the whole withdrawal rather than the excess.

Two things the chart cannot show. The machine’s owner may charge its own fee on top, which Wise neither sets nor refunds — that is between you and whoever put the ATM in the wall. And I had the old scheme in my head until I sat down to write this: for years the rule I remembered was a couple of free withdrawals up to about $200 a month. That scheme is gone, replaced on 1 May 2026 by the country-based allowances above. If you are running on a number you memorised in 2023, check it.

One more limit that is not a fee: the card is not available everywhere. Georgia, where my business is registered, is one of the countries without it. Wise’s own Georgian page says so in as many words — Georgia does not have Wise debit cards yet — and that applies to personal cards as much as business ones. More on what that costs in practice further down.

Converting money inside the app

The Wise exchange rate is the mid-market rate: the midpoint between what the market is bidding and asking, the number you get from a search engine or Reuters, with no markup added. The fee is charged separately and shown before you confirm. Every provider that quotes you a “no fee” conversion is charging you inside the rate instead, and the difference is that you cannot see it.

What the fee actually is depends on the pair and where you start from. On common pairs it begins at 0.33% from the UK, 0.47% from Germany and 0.57% from the US. Thin and exotic currencies run higher, up to around 2%. Across everything Wise moved in the first quarter of 2026 the average price was 0.53%, and across the whole of its 2026 financial year the average take rate was 0.52% — two different measures that happen to land in the same place, which is a reasonable sign that the headline rate is the real one. Above roughly 20,000 GBP a month the percentage steps down, though the threshold is set regionally: my Georgian business profile shows $25,000.

The habit that made the app worth having is smaller than the fee. Because holding a balance costs nothing, I convert when I like the rate rather than when I need the money: euros become dollars on a day that suits me, and the dollars sit there until a dollar invoice arrives. Wise does not push this. There is no trading screen, no leverage, no streak counter, no push notification telling me the euro is moving. Two fields and a number, and that restraint is most of why I still use it after three years. If a conversion is set up but not paid immediately, the rate you were shown is guaranteed for 24 to 48 hours, which covers the gap between deciding and the bank transfer landing.

Why this matters if you are here for bitcoin. Wise is not a place to buy crypto and does not pretend to be one. What it is good for is the leg before that: turning the euros a client paid you into the dollars an exchange quotes in, at a rate you can check against a public reference instead of a spread you have to reverse-engineer. Two practical notes. A transfer from Wise to an exchange is an ordinary transfer, but transfers to crypto platforms are among the payments most likely to attract a compliance check — do not schedule your first one for the day you need the money. And card spending, including buying crypto with the card, does not count towards the referral bonus below: if that is your only planned use, the bonus will not trigger.

Sending and receiving: SWIFT, SEPA and ACH

The Wise multi-currency account holds more than 40 currencies and can be topped up in 23 of them. The part that matters for getting paid is narrower: nine currencies come with local account details plus SWIFT, meaning a counterparty pays you the way they would pay someone domestic rather than through a chain of correspondent banks. Those nine are AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, HKD, HUF, NZD, SGD and USD. Romanian leu has local details with restrictions; Wise has paused issuing new Polish zloty details.

The rails behind those details are the real ones. Sterling goes through Faster Payments, Bacs and CHAPS, with Wise as a direct participant rather than a guest on a partner bank’s licence. Euro goes through SEPA. Dollars arrive by ACH free of charge — but an incoming wire or SWIFT payment in dollars costs $6.11, and that is the fee I resent most, because the sender picks the rail and I find out which one they picked after the money lands.

Speed, in Wise’s own reporting for the first quarter of 2026: 75% of transfers arrived in under 20 seconds and 96% within 24 hours. That is a network average for one quarter, not a promise about your corridor — a first payment to a new recipient in a thin currency can still sit in a compliance check for a day. My own pattern is unremarkable and matches the headline: money to European and US counterparties usually arrives while I am still looking at the confirmation screen.

One caveat that catches people in the eurozone. Wise’s euro details are Belgian, so your IBAN starts with BE, and a certain number of employers, landlords and utility companies still refuse a non-domestic IBAN. Under SEPA rules that refusal is illegal; it happens anyway. Wise acknowledges the problem and points customers at acceptmyiban.org to report it. I have not been bitten by this — but I also do not receive a salary inside the eurozone, which is exactly the situation where it bites.

Interest on balances: read this one twice

Interest is not available in Georgia, so check your own country before reading on — this is the one part of the product I describe rather than run. It is also two different products under one name, and which one you get depends on where you live.

In the UK, most of the EEA and four other countries — 33 in all, opting in buys units in a money market fund run by BlackRock, JPMorgan or, in Australia and Singapore, someone else — picked by where you live, not by the currency. Net rates on 24 June 2026: 3.25% on GBP, 3.39% on USD, 1.98% on EUR. A fund is not a deposit: capital is at risk, the cover is the investment kind (£85,000 under the UK FSCS, €20,000 from the Estonian investor protection fund), and Wise’s own fund documents show the euro fund going negative in 2021 and 2022, when euro rates were below zero.

In the US it is a different machine: balances are swept into Wise’s US program bank, which brings FDIC pass-through insurance — cover reaching you through the bank that holds the pooled account rather than through an account in your own name — up to $250,000 across your USD, EUR and GBP balances combined, not each. The page quoted 3.14% APY as of 18 December 2025; New York and Alaska are excluded.

In both versions the level has tracked the central bank rate minus Wise’s cut: better than a current account paying nothing, below a savings account you went looking for. It is a way of not losing the return on money already sitting there, not a savings product to move money into — the real-world version of the zero I assume when I model what waiting money earns.

Wise Business from a Georgian sole proprietorship

This is the part I have not seen written down anywhere, so here it is in detail. My sole proprietorship is registered in Georgia — the only post-Soviet country outside the Baltics on Wise’s list of 79 countries and territories whose residents can hold a balance. Wise does not publish a whitelist of countries whose businesses it will onboard, so the only honest evidence I can offer is my own: Georgia is on none of the blocked lists, the Georgian business pages are live, and my account has been open and working for years. That is a description of one account, not a promise about yours.

One thing I cannot test for you. I opened this account on Georgian residency, and Wise decides onboarding on documents, not only on the country on the form. Wise does not operate in Russia or Belarus, and it blocked cards held by Russian and Belarusian citizens who could not confirm residency in the EEA or Switzerland by 30 January 2026 — Georgia is neither. If you hold a Russian or Belarusian passport and live in Tbilisi, whether Wise takes you is a question about your documents, and nothing in this article answers it: Wise does not publish the rule and I have only my own case. Ask support with your actual documents before you build anything around a Wise account.

What it costs to open: a one-off charge for the full set of account details, which is 50 GBP in the UK, 31 USD in the US, 45–60 EUR in the EU depending on the country, and 21 GBP for the rest of the world — the line my Georgian entity falls under, and the cheapest of the four. After that the business account is the personal account with more plumbing: the same currencies, the same rails, the same conversion pricing, plus BatchTransfer for paying up to 1,000 recipients from one file, an API, and direct integrations with Xero and QuickBooks.

What is missing is the card. Wise does not issue a business card for Georgia, and as noted above it does not issue a personal one either. So what I have is an account that receives in nine currencies, converts at 0.33–0.57%, and pays out anywhere — with no plastic and no wallet card attached to any of it. Card spending happens on another provider’s card entirely, and Wise sits behind it as the treasury. If you are assembling a financial stack from Georgia, know that before you build around it: account yes, card no, Interest no, and while Wise can send money to Georgian lari, it cannot send money out of a lari balance.

None of which has stopped it being the most useful piece of software in the business. Invoices in three currencies land on local details, conversions happen when the rate is decent rather than when the invoice is due, and the accounting export goes where it needs to go. What is left is an account that receives and converts, and a second provider for anything with plastic on it. Whether that is a narrow gap or a dealbreaker depends on how much of your spending is card spending.

What I don’t like

• It is not a bank, and sometimes you need one. No credit of any kind, no overdraft, no cash deposits, no branch, no relationship manager. And the balance you spend from carries no FSCS or FDIC cover — safeguarding is a different and, in a failure, slower promise than deposit insurance.
• Incoming dollar wires cost $6.11. ACH is free and a wire is not, the sender decides which one to use, and I have never successfully asked a client’s accounts department to care.
• The Belgian IBAN. A euro IBAN is a euro IBAN under SEPA rules, and a meaningful number of counterparties in other euro countries still say no. Wise runs a public campaign about it, which tells you how often it happens.
• Compliance freezes happen. Three years without one is my record and it is not the record: accounts frozen mid-transfer while documents are reviewed are a recurring complaint, and they fall hardest on people whose residency, citizenship and payment corridors do not line up neatly. There is no branch to walk into when it happens — only a chat window.
• The regulatory file is not clean. In July 2026 the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency refused Wise’s application for a national trust bank charter, citing anti-money-laundering deficiencies — and the multistate consent order the OCC leaned on had already cost Wise $4.2 million in July 2025, when six state regulators penalised it over Bank Secrecy Act and AML failings. Separately, the FCA fined its chief executive £350,000 in October 2024 for not telling it about his own tax problems. None of that reaches into safeguarded customer money, and none of it is nothing.
• Country coverage is uneven and the gaps are invisible until you are inside. Georgia gets the account, not the card and not Interest. Wise does not operate in Russia or Belarus, nor in 19 other countries and five regions of Ukraine, and cards held by Russian and Belarusian citizens who could not confirm residency in the EEA or Switzerland have been blocked — that deadline passed on 30 January 2026. Check your own country’s page before you plan around any of this.
• Interest is fund money, and fund money is not always instant. Money market funds can slow or gate withdrawals in a stressed market — that is a standard property of the wrapper, disclosed in the fund’s own documents, not a Wise quirk. It is still the difference between a balance you can spend today and one you assume you can.

Wise vs Revolut vs Payoneer vs your bank

None of these four is the same product, which is why this is worth doing carefully rather than as a scoreboard. Everything below is each provider’s own published pricing as at 5 August 2026, and the three notes underneath the table matter more than the table does.

	Wise	Revolut	Payoneer	A typical bank
Exchange rate	Wise Mid-market, no markup. The fee is charged separately and shown before you confirm.	Revolut Revolut’s own rate, which its terms describe as set by Revolut. Weekend and out-of-hours markup on the lower plans.	Payoneer Payoneer’s own rate: 0.50% between your own balances, 1.2⁠–⁠4% when a withdrawal converts.	A typical bank The bank’s own rate, with 2⁠–⁠4% built into it.
Sending about $1,000 abroad	Wise 0.33⁠–⁠0.57% on common pairs; 0.53% average across all currencies in Q1 2026, so roughly $5.30.	Revolut Free to other Revolut accounts and over SEPA; other corridors a variable fee quoted in the app. Conversion free up to £1,000 a month on Standard, then 1%; no limit on Premium and Metal.	Payoneer 0.50% between balances. Withdrawing costs $1.50 only when the money lands in your own country and currency; any withdrawal that converts — including one paid out in another country’s local currency — costs 1.2⁠–⁠4%. Receiving is free to local details and 1% to non-local ones.	A typical bank $15⁠–⁠50 fixed plus 2⁠–⁠4% inside the rate, and correspondent banks may deduct more en route.
Card	Wise 7 GBP / 7 EUR / 9 USD once, no monthly fee, digital cards free, no card markup on conversion.	Revolut First card free, delivery charged. Plans run £0 to £55 a month.	Payoneer $29.95 a year. Purchases up to 1.8% in the same currency, up to 3.5% with conversion.	A typical bank Varies, and a foreign transaction fee usually sits on top of the markup.
Free ATM allowance	Wise 250 GBP, EUR or USD per calendar month (400 AUD), any number of withdrawals. Above it the UK and eurozone charge 2.69% on the amount over the allowance; the US charges $1.95 plus 1.95% on each full withdrawal past the threshold.	Revolut Standard: 5 withdrawals or £200 per rolling month, whichever runs out first; then 2%, minimum £1.	Payoneer None. $3.15 / €2.50 / £1.95 per withdrawal plus 1.8⁠–⁠3.5%.	A typical bank Varies; abroad, usually a percentage plus a fixed fee.
Return on the balance	Wise Money market fund units, capital at risk. UK, most of the EEA and four other countries — 33 in all. Not in Georgia.	Revolut A bank deposit: full UK banking licence since 11 March 2026, FSCS to £120,000 (in the EEA, its Lithuanian bank). 2.9% AER on Standard, up to about 4% on Ultra.	Payoneer None. Payoneer keeps the interest earned on balances.	A typical bank A deposit, covered by the local scheme — FSCS £120,000, FDIC $250,000.
For a Georgian business	Wise Yes. Account and local details for a one-off 21 GBP. No card, no Interest, and no sending out of a GEL balance.	Revolut Not available — neither personal nor business.	Payoneer Yes — individuals and businesses onboard, but payouts to a Georgian bank go by SWIFT in USD, EUR or GBP only (no GEL, no local rail, next day), and the $29.95 annual fee applies if you receive under $6,000 a year.	A typical bank A Georgian bank, which is the local alternative rather than a fourth version of the same thing.
Rails	Wise Local details in 9 currencies, plus SEPA, Faster Payments, ACH and SWIFT.	Revolut SEPA, local rails and SWIFT.	Payoneer Local receiving in about 10 currencies, plus USD by SWIFT.	A typical bank SWIFT, plus its own domestic rails.

Three places where reading straight across that table would mislead you.

• The rate row is not like-for-like. Wise gives you the mid-market rate and prices the service beside it; Revolut’s own terms say the rate is Revolut’s, set by Revolut. A percentage charged on top of a public reference rate and a percentage charged on top of a rate the provider sets itself are not the same number, and only the first one can be checked against anything.
• The word interest covers three different products. Revolut’s is a bank deposit, protected by the FSCS to £120,000 since its UK banking licence came through in March 2026. Wise’s is units in a money market fund: capital at risk, investment protection rather than deposit protection, and slower to reach in a stressed market. Payoneer’s is nothing at all — it keeps the interest your balance earns. Compare the mechanism before you compare the percentage.
• The ATM rows count differently. Wise’s allowance is an amount per calendar month with no limit on the number of withdrawals. Revolut’s Standard plan is five withdrawals or £200 per rolling month, whichever runs out first — four €50 withdrawals can exhaust the count while barely touching the amount. Payoneer has no free allowance and charges a fee on every withdrawal.

One number that gets quoted at banks deserves quoting carefully, because I nearly used it wrongly myself. The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide, issue 54 for the third quarter of 2025, puts the average cost of sending $200 through a bank at 14.99% — the most expensive provider type it tracks. That is the full cost of a small remittance, where a fixed fee dominates the percentage. It is not an exchange rate markup and it does not scale up: it describes accurately what a bank costs someone sending $200 home and describes badly what it costs to move $1,000.

The short version of the table. If you live in several currencies, Wise is the one built for exactly that: mid-market rate, local details in nine currencies, a price you can verify against a public reference. Revolut is a strong product for people in the UK or EEA who want a card, a deposit and an app in one place and are on a plan that fits — provided it serves their country at all. Payoneer earns its place when a marketplace pays into Payoneer and nowhere else, which is a constraint rather than a preference. And from Georgia the field is two wide, because Revolut is not available there at all: it is Wise or Payoneer — and with either of them the last leg into lari ends outside the app, since Wise can pay out in lari but never send from a lari balance, and Payoneer reaches a Georgian bank only by SWIFT in dollars, euros or pounds, leaving the conversion to that bank at its own rate. For anything that involves holding several currencies at a rate I can check, it is Wise.

Who Wise fits (and who it doesn’t)

It fits if you recognise yourself here:

• You earn in one currency and spend in another, or hold more than one on purpose.
• You travel and do not want to think about the exchange rate at the till.
• You invoice clients abroad and want them to pay you the way they pay everyone else — local details, not a SWIFT chain.
• You would rather see a 0.5% fee written down than a 3% spread you have to reverse-engineer.
• You want an app that does not try to sell you anything else.

It does not fit if:

• You need what a bank does — a loan, an overdraft, cash across a counter, a mortgage conversation.
• You want deposit insurance on your working balance. Safeguarding is not the FSCS and is not the FDIC.
• You live somewhere Wise does not serve, or somewhere it serves only halfway — the card and Interest gaps are country-by-country and they are not advertised.
• You would put your whole financial life in it. One account with no branch and a chat window for support is a single point of failure, and the freeze stories are what that failure looks like.
• Your money arrives as cash. There is nowhere to put it.

The referral bonus, mechanics included

The link in this article is a Wise referral link, so here is exactly how it pays, including the parts that do not.

• What you get. A new customer chooses one of two things: a free card, or one transfer with no fee up to a set amount. What is on offer and how large it is depends on your region, and Wise does not publish a single figure — its own help page uses the phrasing “let’s say yours is for 500 GBP” as an example. What my link currently offers in most regions is a free card or a fee-free transfer up to €500. The invite page shows the exact terms for your country before you sign up, and that page is the authority here, not this paragraph.
• It expires. The voucher runs for six months.
• It does not cover everything. Same-currency top-ups do not count, and card spending does not count — the bonus applies to a conversion or a transfer. Buying crypto with the card does not count towards qualifying either.
• What I get. A reward for every three invited people who each make a qualifying transfer of 200 GBP or the equivalent. Three real users, not three signups — which is why there is a downsides section above rather than below the fold.

If the article has left you wanting the account: open it through my link and the bonus above is applied to your side automatically. If it has left you deciding against, that is a perfectly good outcome of an honest review, and I would rather have it than the referral.

After three years

What I would tell someone asking over dinner: it does one thing, does it at a price you can read, and does not pretend to be a bank in the places where that would be convenient for it. The fee is real and small — 0.33% to 0.57% on common pairs, 0.53% on average across everything Wise moved last quarter. The gaps are real too, and geographic rather than technical: my own business country gets the account and not the card, the balance carries no deposit insurance, and a company that asked to become a US trust bank was turned down in July 2026 on anti-money-laundering grounds. Weigh those against a bank that hides two to four percent inside the rate, adds a wire fee and calls the rate free, and I have made the same choice for three years running — no block, no freeze, no lost payment, and one person’s record is still one person’s record.

If you want to try it, my referral link is here — free card or a fee-free transfer for you, a referral reward for this site, and the same pricing either way.

Frequently asked questions

Is Wise safe?

Wise is a regulated and listed company: a UK e-money institution licensed by the FCA (firm reference 900507), Wise Europe SA under the National Bank of Belgium in the EU, a FinCEN-registered money services business in the US, AFSL 513764 in Australia, plus MAS, FINTRAC and Japanese registrations. Customer money is safeguarded — held apart from company money at banks including Barclays, Citibank, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank, and in government bonds maturing in under three years. But safeguarding is not deposit insurance: Wise states that balances are not subject to the FSCS, and there is no FDIC cover on an ordinary balance either. It is a payments company, and the failure mode is different from a bank’s.

What are Wise fees for currency conversion?

Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate with no markup and charges the fee separately. On common pairs it starts at 0.33% from the UK, 0.47% from Germany and 0.57% from the US; thin or exotic currencies run higher, up to around 2%. Across everything Wise moved in Q1 2026 the average price was 0.53%, and the average take rate for its 2026 financial year was 0.52%. Above roughly 20,000 GBP a month the percentage steps down, though the threshold is set regionally — a Georgian business profile shows $25,000.

Does the Wise card charge foreign transaction fees?

There is no separate card markup. If you hold the currency you are paying in, spending is free. If you do not, the card converts automatically from your cheapest balance at the ordinary conversion fee. The card itself costs 7 GBP, 7 EUR or 9 USD once, with no monthly fee, and digital cards are free. Cash is metered separately: since 1 May 2026 the free ATM allowance is 250 EUR, 250 GBP or 250 USD a month depending on the country that issued the card, 400 AUD in Australia and 25,000 JPY in Japan. Above the allowance the eurozone and the UK charge 2.69% on the amount over it, while the US charges $1.95 plus 1.95% on each full withdrawal past the threshold. The ATM owner may add its own fee.

How many currencies does a Wise account hold?

More than 40 currencies can be held and 23 can be topped up. Nine of them come with local account details as well as SWIFT — AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, HKD, HUF, NZD, SGD and USD — so a payer can send money domestically instead of through a correspondent chain. Romanian leu has local details with restrictions, and Wise has paused issuing new Polish zloty details. The euro details are Belgian, and some counterparties in other euro countries still refuse a non-domestic IBAN even though SEPA rules forbid that refusal.

Can I use Wise in Georgia?

Partly. Georgia is on Wise’s list of 79 countries and territories whose residents can hold a balance — the only post-Soviet country outside the Baltics on it — and a Georgian sole proprietorship can run a Wise Business account, which is what I do. But Wise does not issue debit cards in Georgia, personal or business, the Interest product is not available there, and while money can be sent to Georgian lari it cannot be sent out of a lari balance. Wise does not publish a whitelist of business registration countries, so the working account described in this article is one data point rather than a guarantee.

How does the Wise referral bonus work?

A new customer joining through a referral link picks one of two things: a free card, or one fee-free transfer up to a set amount. The exact offer depends on the region and Wise does not publish a single figure — its own help page uses 500 GBP as an example, and the link in this article currently offers a free card or a fee-free transfer up to 500 EUR in most regions. The voucher lasts six months, does not apply to same-currency top-ups or card spending, and crypto purchases do not count towards qualifying. The person who invited you is rewarded for every three invitees who each make a qualifying transfer of 200 GBP or equivalent.