Free Transfers in Davao: Which Banks and E-Wallets Still Charge to Send Money

For years the honest answer to “how do I send money in Davao without a fee” was a careful table of who charged ₱10, who charged ₱15, and who charged ₱50. That table is mostly obsolete. In the middle of 2026 the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas changed the rule under everyone, and the fees collapsed. The useful question now is the opposite of the old one: not who lets you send for free, but who still makes you pay.

What actually changed

The shift came from a BSP issuance — Memorandum M-2026-025, dated 17 June 2026, implementing Circular 1238 — reported by GMA News as a rule requiring digital transfer fees to reflect only the real cost of moving money between institutions. Under it, an interbank fee may not be materially higher than a bank charges to move money within its own network, and the leftover is little more than the small “switch” cost of routing a payment across the system. Faced with a fee that could no longer cover much beyond that switch cost, most banks did the simple thing. They dropped it to zero.

The rollout ran through July, one bank at a time. BPI went first, making interbank transfers permanently free across its app, online banking and VYBE on 1 July. Landbank and UnionBank followed on the 7th, BDO on the 9th, and the rest fell into line across the month. This was no sale. It is the standing schedule, and the BSP now publishes it in one place, in a fee schedule it updates by name and date.

The two rails, in one sentence each

Every free transfer runs on one of two systems, and knowing which one you are on tells you the limit and the speed.

Use InstaPay for anything urgent under ₱50,000 — rent, a supplier, splitting a bill. Use PESONet when the amount is larger and can wait until the end of the banking day. Both are free at the banks below; the choice is about size and speed, not cost.

Who still charges

Here is the whole exception list a Davao reader is likely to run into, taken from the BSP’s fee schedule and its numbered footnotes.

Two of the four exceptions are conditional, and that is the useful detail. GoTyme gives you twenty free InstaPay sends a month before the ₱9 starts, and CIMB gives you two. Most households never hit either ceiling. GCash and the Maya wallet are the ones that charge from the very first peso, ₱10 each, on every send to a bank account. That is the whole exception list.

Why GCash still charges, when your bank does not

This is the question the fee tables never answer, and it is worth understanding before you decide anything. The money still travels on InstaPay, the same rail your free-transfer bank uses. So the ₱10 is not a tax, and it is not a BSP fee. It is a choice. GCash kept the charge in place — lowered from ₱15 to ₱10 rather than removed — where nine banks chose to absorb the small switch cost themselves and pass you nothing.

There is a design reason it lands differently. GCash keeps its wallet-to-wallet lane free: sending GCash-to-GCash stays free for the first 500 transfers a month. The ₱10 only appears when you leave the GCash network and push money into a bank account. So the app is free among its own users and ten pesos to everyone else, which is exactly the pattern that makes it feel like a fee you cannot escape when half your payments go to bank accounts.

The Davao angle: it reaches the palengke, too

The same free QR Ph rail that moves money between apps now reaches the market stall. Under the national Paleng-QR Ph program run by the BSP and the DILG, Davao City launched QR Ph acceptance at Bankerohan Public Market on 23 November 2022, and extended it to other public markets, including Agdao, Toril and Calinan, through 2023. A vendor with a QR Ph code is paid straight into a bank or wallet, and the buyer pays from the same free personal-transfer lane covered above. Paying your suki by scanning a code is the same transaction as paying a landlord bank-to-bank, minus the cash.

For the practical cash-in side, the free-transfer banks worth holding all have a Davao presence — BPI, BDO, Metrobank, Landbank and UnionBank branches are across the city — so funding the account you send from does not require a trip to another town.

What we are not telling you, and why

Two numbers that circulate are left out here on purpose. The reported ₱500,000 InstaPay ceiling for business or merchant accounts could not be confirmed against a primary source, so this guide states only the ₱50,000 personal per-transfer cap, which is verified. And the exact split between GCash’s help page and the BSP footnote on the ₱10 fee rests on GMA’s reporting plus the BSP schedule rather than GCash’s own page, which was unreachable. The fee schedule itself moved almost weekly through July 2026, so treat the table above as a dated snapshot and check the BSP PDF if you are moving a large sum on a fee that matters to you.

Before you send

If you are weighing where the money should sit before you move it, the note on why your Davao savings are losing to inflation does the real-return math on the account it waits in. For money coming from abroad rather than across town, the guide to receiving an OFW remittance in Davao compares Wise, Remitly and the counter services, and freelancers being paid through platforms should read getting paid via Upwork, Wise and Payoneer in Davao. To see where a saved ₱10-a-week actually lands in a month, the monthly budget tool puts it against the rest of your Davao costs.