How to convert crypto to cash — and which route is actually cheapest
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The route with the lowest trading fee is not the cheapest route. An order-book sale costs 0.100% to execute and then 25.00 USD to get the money out — 26.00 in total on 1,000.00 USD.
- A flat payout fee makes “cheapest” a function of the amount, not a ranking. The same 25.00 USD is 12.5% of a 200 USD withdrawal and 0.5% of a 5,000 USD one.
- The two directions are not priced alike. Deposits are free; the published way out is 25.00 USD flat. Price the round trip before the first deposit, not after.
- On a quoted price — one-click sales and peer-to-peer offers alike — the fee line is not the cost. The gap between that quote and the spot book is real money that no table shows you.
What are you actually paying to cash out?
Five separate things, and most guides price only the second one. Getting money out of crypto is a chain, and every link has a price attached to it:
One — getting the coin to the venue that will buy it. If the coin is already sitting on the exchange, this costs nothing. If it is in your own wallet or on another platform, somebody charges a network fee to move it, and the size of that fee has almost nothing to do with the amount you are sending. Binance publishes withdrawal fees for USDT on nineteen networks that range from 0.01 to 1.5 USDT for exactly the same token.
Two — converting the coin into currency. This is the part everyone compares. On an order book it is a trading fee, 0.100%% for a regular Binance user. On a one-click sell it is a published percentage. On a peer-to-peer market it is close to nothing.
Three — the price you get, which is not the same as the fee you pay. Whenever a screen quotes you a price rather than matching your order on a public book, the difference between that quote and the market is a cost with no line item. Binance says this about its own Convert product in plain language: it is “common to see a different price for the same token on Binance Convert and other markets.”
Four — the payout fee. Getting the currency out of the account and into a bank. This is the one that is usually flat, and being flat is what makes the whole question depend on the amount.
Five — whatever your own side charges. Receiving banks take cuts on incoming international wires, card issuers apply their own terms, and a currency conversion at your bank is priced by your bank, not by the exchange. None of it appears on any page you were reading when you decided.
Our companion guide, funding an account without overpaying, prices the first direction. This one prices the second, and the arithmetic comes out inverted — which is exactly why the two guides do not give the same advice.
What does it cost to get 1,000 USD out?
Here is the same 1,000.00 USD of stablecoin taken off the platform four different ways, using the fees Binance publishes. Nothing changes except the exit.
| Exit | What you pay | Cost on 1,000.00 USD | As a % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sell on the order book, wire the dollars out | 0.100% taker + 25.00 flat | 26.00 | 2.600% |
| One-click sell to a card | 2% | 20.00 | 2.000% |
| One-click sell to PayPal | 1.5% | 15.00 | 1.500% |
| One-click sell to SEPA | 1 EUR flat | ~1.00 | ~0.100% plus the quote |
| Peer-to-peer sale | 0.1% fee + the price gap you accept | 11.00 | 1.100% |
Two things in that table deserve more attention than they usually get.
The first is that the route with the lowest fee is the most expensive route. Executing the sale on the order book costs 0.100% — one dollar — and is the cheapest conversion on the page by a wide margin. Then the payout fee lands on top of it and the total comes to 26.00, which is more than the card charges for the whole job. The trading fee was never the number that mattered.
The second is that the cheapest published fee on the page belongs to the product whose price you cannot verify. A one-click sale to SEPA is billed at a flat 1 EUR. That is a genuinely tiny fee. But the card row and the SEPA row are the same product with different payout rails, and both hand you a quoted price rather than matching your order on a public book. If that quote sits half a percent away from the market, it costs 5.00 USD on a 1,000.00 USD sale — five times the fee itself. The fee line tells you what the SEPA row charges; it does not tell you what the SEPA row costs.
One caveat on scope, because it matters: the fiat table read without logging in lists only two currencies, US dollars and Azerbaijani manat. The 25.00 USD wire fee is one row of a short public table, not a universal exchange withdrawal fee, and what your own account offers depends on where you are.
Why does the cheapest route change with the amount?
Because one of the fees is flat and the rest are percentages, and those two shapes always cross. Run the same three routes at 200 USD and at 5,000 USD and the order reverses completely:
| Amount | Order book + wire | Peer-to-peer | Card | Cheapest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 200 | 25.20 (12.600%) | 2.20 (1.100%) | 4.00 (2.000%) | Peer-to-peer |
| 1,000 | 26.00 (2.600%) | 11.00 (1.100%) | 20.00 (2.000%) | Peer-to-peer |
| 5,000 | 30.00 (0.600%) | 55.00 (1.100%) | 100.00 (2.000%) | Order book + wire |
| 20,000 | 45.00 (0.225%) | 220.00 (1.100%) | 400.00 (2.000%) | Order book + wire |
You can find the exact turning point rather than guessing at it. A flat fee equals a percentage fee when the amount equals the flat fee divided by the difference between the two rates. With a 25.00 flat wire fee on top of a 0.100% trading fee:
- against a 2% card, the wire becomes cheaper above 1,315.79 USD;
- against PayPal at 1.5%, above 1,785.71 USD;
- against a peer-to-peer sale losing 1% on price, above 2,500.00 USD.
That last line is the one to hold loosely, because the 1% is an assumption rather than a measurement, and the answer moves a long way when it changes. If the peer-to-peer market is tight and you only give up 0.3% on price, the wire does not catch up until 8,333.33 USD. If the market is thin and you give up 3%, the wire is already cheaper from 833.33 USD. Same routes, same fees, a twenty-fold swing in the answer — driven entirely by a number that is not printed on any fee page and that you have to go and look at yourself.
How do you measure the peer-to-peer gap in sixty seconds?
This is the one skill on the page worth actually learning, because for a very large share of the world it is the only exit that exists. In Nigeria, India, the Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh, the SWIFT and SEPA rows above are not on offer at all, so the entire question “what does it cost to cash out” collapses into “what price gap am I accepting?”
Open two tabs. In the first, look at the spot price of the pair you are selling. In the second, open the peer-to-peer market for your currency and look at the best price buyers are actually offering for the payment method you can use. Then:
gap = (spot price − best peer-to-peer bid) ÷ spot price
Multiply that percentage by your amount and you have your cost on this route, more or less in full, because the trading fee itself is around 0.1% and the platform says even that varies by user tier. A 1% gap on 1,000.00 USD is 10.00. A 2.5% gap on the same amount is 25.00 — which is, not coincidentally, the entire wire fee that this route was supposed to save you.
Do the measurement every time, not once. The gap moves with the hour, with the currency, with the payment method and with how much you are selling. And one warning that has nothing to do with price: escrow protects you only while the trade stays inside the platform. If a counterparty asks you to settle somewhere else, every protection you were counting on disappears at that moment.
Which screen are you on, and what does each tab cost?
Most withdrawal screens have two tabs that look almost identical and are priced by completely different tables. One sends coin to a blockchain address and charges a network fee; the other sends currency to a bank and charges a currency fee. Picking the wrong tab is not a small mistake, because it changes both the price and whether the transfer can be reversed.
There is a second, subtler version of the same trap: the same company can run two storefronts at two prices. Kraken publishes both an Instant Buy/Sell product charging 1%% plus a spread — its own fee schedule notes that Kraken “may retain any excess spread” — and a professional order book whose first tier charges 0.40%% maker and 0.80%% taker. A beginner who opens the app lands on the first one by default. Same firm, same coin, same minute, different price, and no prompt anywhere suggesting you walk through the other door.
Which is the practical reason to look at what a platform charges before you have money sitting on it rather than after. The exit fee is set the day you choose where to deposit, and you will pay it when you are least inclined to shop around. Our exchange comparison lists the fee pages side by side, and the two numbers worth reading there are the payout fee and the first-tier taker fee — in that order, because as this page has shown, the payout fee is usually the larger of the two.
What should you check before you press withdraw?
Six checks, in this order. The first is the one that decides the other five.
- Decide the amount before you decide the route. A flat fee and a percentage fee cross over, so the cheapest exit at 200 USD is not the cheapest at 5,000. Work out the amount first; the route follows from it.
- Open both withdrawal tabs and read them side by side. The Crypto tab charges a network fee and the Fiat tab charges a currency fee. They are different tables with different numbers, and nothing on the screen tells you which one is cheaper for you.
- Convert every published fee into your own currency. Two percent does not feel like anything; 20.00 on a 1,000 USD sale does. Your brain prices currency and ignores percentages.
- If you are selling at a quoted price, compare it against the spot book first. One-click sell products quote you a price rather than matching on the book. Open the same pair in another tab and compare the unit price. That gap costs real money and appears on no fee line.
- If you are selling peer-to-peer, measure the gap before you accept an offer. Take the best bid the market shows you, subtract it from the spot price, and divide by spot. That percentage is your whole cost on this route, and it changes hour to hour.
- Send a small test first on any payout rail you have not used. Bank rails reject mismatched names and can hold funds. A first small payout confirms the name, the account and the rail before the amount that matters follows it.
Which mistakes do careful people still make?
Optimising the trading fee and ignoring the payout fee. It is the natural thing to do, because the trading fee is the number every comparison page leads with. On 1,000.00 USD it is one dollar out of 26.00. You can halve it by paying fees in the exchange token and save fifty cents, while the other twenty-five dollars sits there untouched.
Cashing out in small pieces. Every trip pays the flat portion again. Four separate 250 USD withdrawals cost 100.00 in wire fees; one 1,000.00 USD withdrawal costs 25.00 and moves the same money.
Treating a quoted price as a free quote. Zero commission does not mean zero cost. If the screen did not match your order against a public book, the price itself is where the charge lives, and the only way to see it is to compare against the spot pair in another tab while the quote is still on screen.
Sending the coin to the wrong network to save a fee. The cheapest network row is not always the right one, and Binance’s own help pages say so in unusually blunt terms: “DO NOT select the cheapest fee option… If you select the wrong network, your funds might be lost and cannot be recovered.” Our withdrawal checklist covers that decision properly.
Forgetting the receiving side. An international wire can be trimmed by an intermediary bank, converted at your bank’s own rate, or delayed by a name mismatch. None of that is visible on the exchange’s fee page, and all of it lands on the amount that finally shows up in your account.
When is this guide wrong?
In four situations, each common enough to name.
When the bank rails simply are not available to you. For most readers outside North America and Europe, the wire row does not exist in their account, so the comparison above collapses to one route and one number: the peer-to-peer gap. The method still holds, the rows do not.
When the amount is large enough to move the market you are selling into. The table treats the peer-to-peer gap as a constant 1%%, which is a reasonable sketch for a few thousand dollars and a poor one for a large order. Sell enough and you work down the offers, the gap widens as you go, and the linear model above stops describing anything real.
When there is a daily limit in the way. Some accounts and some currencies cap how much fiat can leave per day. Once a cap binds, “cheapest” quietly stops being the question and “how many days” takes its place.
When tax is involved. In many countries selling crypto is a taxable event, and the sum at stake there can dwarf every fee on this page. We are not qualified to tell you how that works where you live, and this guide deliberately does not try. Find someone who is, before the sale rather than after it.
FAQ
What is the cheapest way to convert crypto to cash? There is no single answer, and any page that gives you one has skipped the arithmetic. The cost is a flat fee plus a percentage, so the ranking depends on the amount. On 1,000.00 USD a peer-to-peer sale at a 1% price gap costs about 11.00, a card sale 20.00, and an order-book sale followed by a 25.00 USD wire 26.00. Push the amount up to 5,000 USD and the wire becomes the cheapest of the three at 30.00 while the card climbs to 100.00. The crossover between the wire and the card sits at about 1,315.79 USD. Binance published fees, read 12 September 2026.
Why did I receive less money than the fee page said I would? Because a quoted price is not the order book. One-click sell products and peer-to-peer offers both hand you a price, and that price does not have to match the mid-point of the same pair at the same moment. The difference is a cost that appears on no fee line at all. Binance says as much about its own Convert product: it is “common to see a different price for the same token on Binance Convert and other markets.” Half a percent on a 1,000 USD sale is 5.00 USD, which is five times the 1 EUR fee that the cheapest published row charges.
Is it cheaper to withdraw crypto or to withdraw cash? Sending the coin out is almost always the cheaper transfer, because network fees are small and fiat payout fees frequently are not: moving USDT costs between 0.01 and 1.5 USDT depending on the network, against 25.00 USD flat for a USD wire. But the two are not the same act. A crypto withdrawal is irreversible and sends the money somewhere that is not a bank account, so you still have to convert it somewhere else afterwards. Cheaper per hop is not cheaper end to end, and it carries a mistake you cannot undo.
How much should I cash out at once? Enough that the flat portion stops dominating. A 25.00 USD flat fee is 12.5% of a 200 USD withdrawal and 0.5% of a 5,000 USD one, on the same row of the same table. Four small withdrawals pay the flat fee four times; one larger withdrawal pays it once. The counterweight is that money sitting on an exchange is money you do not control, so the honest answer is the smallest number of withdrawals that leaves you holding no more on the platform than you are willing to lose.