Migration and remittance now rival garments as Bangladesh's economic engine: record inflows, the world's highest migration costs, and the risks workers face.
Every year, more than a million Bangladeshis board flights to jobs abroad, and every month they send home close to three billion dollars. The money pays school fees in Sylhet, builds houses in Cumilla, services loans in Barisal and, at the national level, has become one of the two great pillars of Bangladesh's foreign-exchange earnings alongside garment exports. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2026, expatriate Bangladeshis remitted a record US$35.59 billion through official channels, according to Bangladesh Bank — roughly 7 percent of GDP on World Bank estimates, and more than twenty times the country's foreign direct investment. Yet the system that produces these flows rests on some of the most expensive, and most dangerous, journeys in world labour migration. How that system grew, where the money comes from, what it does when it arrives, and what it costs the people who earn it is one of the central stories of modern Bangladesh.
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Bangladesh entered the international labour market in 1976, when the oil boom in the Gulf created sudden demand for construction and service workers. In that first year only about 6,000 workers left, and they sent home roughly US$23 million. The government created the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET) the same year to register workers, license recruiting agencies and issue the emigration clearances that remain mandatory today.
The flow grew with each decade, through the Gulf War disruptions of the early 1990s, the expansion into Malaysia and East Asia, and the creation of a dedicated Ministry of Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment. A second institution, the Wage Earners' Welfare Fund, followed in 1990, financed largely by fees paid by the migrants themselves; its governing board later became the statutory Wage Earners' Welfare Board (WEWB), which funds everything from airport welfare desks to the repatriation of workers who die abroad. The Overseas Employment and Migrants Act 2013 now governs recruitment, licensing and cost ceilings.
The recent outflow numbers describe both the scale and the volatility of the system. BMET recorded 1,135,873 departures in 2022 and an all-time record 1,303,453 in 2023, before the total fell to 1,011,969 in 2024 and recovered to 1,130,757 in 2025. Saudi Arabia dominates as a destination: it took 752,715 workers in 2025, about two-thirds of the total, and hosts more than three million Bangladeshis in all, according to the foreign ministry. Qatar, Kuwait, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates follow at a distance. Women are a minority of the flow — 61,977 in 2025 — but work across 63 countries, many as domestic workers in the Gulf.
How many Bangladeshis are abroad at any one moment is genuinely unknown. Ministry officials cited figures of more than 15 million workers overseas in 2026, while the Dhaka University-based research unit RMMRU points out that, because returns are not systematically counted, no accurate stock figure exists; older official descriptions spoke of more than 10 million people in some 176 countries. What is certain is the direction of recent travel: in the fiscal year 2025-26 departures fell to just over 969,000, a five-year low, and in the first ten months of 2026 BMET cleared 612,897 workers, a third fewer than a year earlier, as conflict in the Middle East — above all the war involving Iran and attacks on Saudi Arabia — cut demand in the largest market. The pipeline of people, in other words, can narrow quickly. The money, so far, has not.
Remittance inflows have set records in three consecutive fiscal years: US$23.91 billion in 2023-24, US$30.33 billion in 2024-25 — the first crossing of the thirty-billion line — and US$35.59 billion in 2025-26, Bangladesh Bank figures show. The first four months of 2026-27 brought a further US$11.47 billion, 13 percent more than a year earlier. This is not the first surge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when departures collapsed to 217,669 in 2020, inflows jumped to a then-record US$24.78 billion in 2020-21 as travel restrictions forced money out of informal hand-carried channels and into banks. The following year they fell back to US$21.03 billion despite record departures, a dip analysts attributed to a wide gap between the official exchange rate and the kerb market, which rewarded the informal hundi networks instead.
The post-August 2024 surge has a similar explanation, run in reverse. After the political change of that month, Bangladesh Bank officials and analysts describe a combination of enforcement against hundi operators, a more market-aligned exchange rate that shrank the formal–informal spread to under two percent, and the standing 2.5 percent government cash incentive on money sent through legal channels. Migrants who had settled abroad during the record departures of 2022 and 2023 were also simply earning and sending more. The result steadied the whole economy: remittances financed the import bill, rebuilt foreign-exchange reserves — about US$36 billion gross by late October 2026 — and produced Bangladesh's first current-account surplus in years.
Geographically, the money mirrors the migration map, with some surprises. In 2025-26 Saudi Arabia was the largest source at US$5.85 billion, followed by the United Kingdom at US$5.07 billion, the UAE at US$4.58 billion, Malaysia at US$3.40 billion and the United States at US$3.33 billion; the top five supplied 61.6 percent of the total. The Gulf states together account for roughly half of all inflows. One caution applies to the rankings: since April 2025 Bangladesh Bank has required banks to record each remittance by its true country of origin rather than the country of the company routing it, which mechanically lowered the recorded US share — the United States had appeared to be the single largest source in 2024-25 — and lifted the Gulf and UK figures. The concentration itself is the policy concern: an economy funded substantially by workers in a handful of countries is exposed to every shock in those countries, as the 2026 departure slump shows.
At the household level, remittances are first of all income. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics' Survey on the Use of Remittances found that money from abroad made up 78 percent of receiving households' total income, and a Bangladesh Bank survey found around 90 percent of remittances going to basic needs: food first, then education, medical treatment, marriages and ceremonies, with 42 percent of households using the money to repay loans. Later BBS survey rounds put the investment share of remittances at about a quarter to a third — overwhelmingly land purchase and house construction or improvement — with loan repayment and land together absorbing roughly a fifth of receipts, and savings a smaller share, much of it held in bank accounts rather than in bonds or businesses.
Economists therefore argue about the word "unproductive." Consumption by poor households is not waste: it is nutrition, schooling and healthcare, and it supports local shops, builders and transport across the districts that send the most workers. Remittances have demonstrably cut poverty in high-migration areas and financed a visible transformation of rural housing. But the structure of use also reflects the structure of the system: a family that borrowed heavily to send a son to Riyadh spends his first two years of earnings servicing that debt, and land and housing are the assets rural families trust. Channelling more of the flow into enterprises and formal investment instruments remains an unfinished policy project, taken up below.
The Bangladeshi worker pays more to reach a foreign job than almost anyone else on earth. A World Bank report in 2015, drawing on KNOMAD recruitment-cost surveys, found Bangladeshi workers paying the highest recruitment costs in the world. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics' and ILO's Survey on the Cost of Migration 2020, covering people who migrated between 2015 and 2018, put the average cost at Tk 416,789 — about Tk 4.71 lakh for men and Tk 1 lakh for women — with low-skilled workers paying an average of Tk 478,000, equivalent to 17.6 months of their earnings abroad. A job in Saudi Arabia cost on average Tk 436,366 against a government-fixed ceiling of Tk 165,000; Singapore cost Tk 574,241. Surveys consistently find that roughly three-quarters or more of the money is captured not by airlines or governments but by chains of brokers and sub-agents — the village dalal who connects a worker to a Dhaka agency, takes the largest cut, and is the hardest part of the system to regulate. Families finance the sum by selling land, borrowing from relatives and taking high-interest loans, which is why a failed migration — a fake visa, a vanished job — can ruin a household.
Malaysia shows how the costs and the politics intertwine. Kuala Lumpur suspended recruitment from Bangladesh in September 2018 amid allegations that a small syndicate of agencies, under a government-to-government-plus arrangement, had monopolised the trade. A fresh memorandum of understanding in December 2021 reopened the market in August 2022, with Malaysia itself selecting the agencies allowed to recruit. The official cost was fixed at Tk 78,990, yet workers commonly paid between Tk 3.5 lakh and Tk 6 lakh; when the entry deadline passed on 31 May 2024, about 18,000 people who had paid were still stranded at home, and the market closed again. Recruiters estimate some 800,000 Bangladeshi workers remain in Malaysia. As of late 2026 the two governments were negotiating a reopening — Malaysia has spoken of taking about 200,000 workers, the first 10,000 to travel free through the state agency BOESL — but the process was unfinished and fears of a new syndicate were again being voiced by recruiters and migration researchers alike.
The gravest risks are physical. The Wage Earners' Welfare Board, which brings home the bodies of workers who die abroad, recorded 3,651 repatriations in 2019 and a record 4,813 in 2024; the average age of the dead that year was 38. In the first nine months of 2026 alone, 4,060 bodies returned — more than fourteen a day — nearly half of them from Saudi Arabia. Ministry data attribute about two-thirds of deaths to natural causes and over 16 percent to accidents on roads and worksites, in falls and fires; an RMMRU study found that 48 percent of bereaved families did not believe the cause stated on the death certificate. The board pays Tk 35,000 toward each burial and larger grants to families, a small formal recognition of a large informal grief.
Other dangers lie off the official map altogether. In 2025 Bangladeshis were the largest nationality attempting the Central Mediterranean crossing to Europe — 22 percent of all attempts, according to the UNHCR–IOM joint overview — with IOM estimating about 14,000 arrivals in Italy in 2024 and 20,000 in 2025, on journeys sold by brokers for Tk 10–14 lakh, often via detention and extortion in Libya; IOM recorded 1,330 people dead or missing on that route in 2025 across all nationalities. Italy has designated Bangladesh a "safe country" and rejects nearly nine in ten Bangladeshi asylum claims. A newer trap has appeared in the east: Prothom Alo reported in October 2026 that at least 54 Bangladeshis lured to Russia with promises of jobs had been killed fighting in the war in Ukraine, their bodies never returned.
Women face a distinct version of these risks. Organised female migration to Saudi Arabia as domestic workers began under a 2015 agreement, into households where the worker is largely invisible to labour inspection. In 2019, waves of returnees brought allegations of physical and sexual abuse and unpaid wages; the expatriates' welfare ministry's own report to a parliamentary committee found that among 110 women who returned on a single day that August, 35 percent had been physically or sexually abused and 44 percent had not been paid regularly, while the rights group OKUP reported still higher rates of physical abuse among the returnees it interviewed. The government responded by closing 166 recruiting agencies, agreeing a joint worker database and safe-home arrangements with Saudi authorities, and acknowledging that some women were tortured; the foreign minister nonetheless ruled out stopping female migration, pointing to the quarter of a million or more women then working in the kingdom. Women still leave in large numbers — Saudi Arabia took 44,578 female workers in 2025 — into a protection debate that remains unresolved.
The state's toolkit has grown around three aims: bring the money through banks, lower the cost of leaving, and catch those who fall. For the first, the centrepiece is the cash incentive — 2 percent on formal-channel remittances from 2019, raised to 2.5 percent in January 2022 and retained in the budget for 2026-27 — supplemented by the market-based exchange rate that removed most of hundi's price advantage. The incentive is not costless: by mid-2026 the government owed banks more than Tk 8,565 crore in unreimbursed incentive payments, a backlog the banks were carrying on the state's behalf.
For the migrant as saver and borrower, two institutions matter most. The Universal Pension Scheme launched in August 2023 includes a Probash package for expatriates, with monthly instalments of Tk 5,000, Tk 7,500 or Tk 10,000 payable in foreign currency. And since 2011, migrants have had a bank of their own: the state-owned Probashi Kallyan Bank, owned almost entirely by the Wage Earners' Welfare Board, which offers collateral-free migration loans intended to break the moneylender's hold on departing workers, rehabilitation loans for returnees, and remittance services through its branch network. Its lending remains small beside the scale of the flow — a few lakh workers a year borrow informally for every cohort the bank finances — which is one measure of the gap between policy design and market reality.
On protection, BMET resolved a record 2,054 migrant complaints in 2025 and recovered Tk 9.92 crore in compensation, and small dignities have been added at the border itself: a dedicated Probashi Lounge, opened at Dhaka's Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in November 2024 with IOM support, gives departing and returning workers a place to rest, subsidised food and staff to help with formalities, alongside the welfare desks the WEWB maintains at the airports. The harder problems — broker-driven costs several times the legal ceiling, the syndication of major labour markets, the deaths recorded daily at the airport cargo terminal — have resisted five decades of incremental reform.
Fifty years after the first few thousand workers flew to the Gulf, migration and remittances have become Bangladesh's second engine: US$35.59 billion in a single year, earned by somewhere between ten and fifteen million people, funding everything from village school fees to the central bank's reserves. The same half-century has entrenched the system's original sins — the world's highest migration costs, broker chains that capture most of what a worker pays, concentrated markets that can close overnight, and a daily toll of coffins at the airport. The records of 2024, 2025 and 2026 prove the model's earning power; the departure slump of 2026, driven by war in the region where most Bangladeshis work, is a reminder of its fragility. Whether the next fifty years bring cheaper, safer and more skilled migration — or simply more of the same, at larger scale — is the economic question on which much of Bangladesh's future quietly depends.
