Invoice Currency 2026: Cross-Border Data [Data]

63% of US small businesses that source products or services internationally still pay their overseas suppliers primarily in US dollars, and only 4% pay predominantly in the supplier’s own local currency, according to a 2026 PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard study of 535 US small businesses. The currency printed on a cross-border invoice is not a minor formality: it decides who absorbs the exchange-rate risk, how much of the payment disappears into conversion fees, and how long the money takes to actually land. This guide covers how many small businesses invoice across borders in 2026, which currencies they actually use, why the dollar keeps winning even when the supplier operates somewhere else entirely, and what that currency choice costs in real fees.

How many small businesses actually invoice or pay across borders in 2026?

International sourcing is now the norm, not the exception, for US small businesses. 57% of all US small businesses source products or services from an international supplier, according to PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard’s February 2026 survey of 535 firms with revenue up to $10 million. That share is not evenly spread across firm sizes: among businesses generating $1 million to $10 million a year, 73% source internationally, nearly three in four. Smaller, earlier-stage businesses source overseas less often, but the overall direction is the same across every revenue band tracked in the study, more sourcing relationships crossing a border every year, not fewer.

Figure 1: Share of US small businesses sourcing products or services internationally, all businesses versus $1M-$10M revenue firms, February 2026. Source: PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard, “The Cross-Border Opportunity: What Global Sourcing by US SMBs Means for Payment Providers” (535 US small businesses, survey conducted February 12-24, 2026).

That growth in sourcing volume is exactly why the currency question matters more every year. A business that sends one international invoice a year can absorb an awkward currency conversion as a one-off cost of doing business. A business that pays 20 or 30 overseas suppliers a month is running a recurring, compounding exposure to exchange rates and conversion fees, whether it has actually noticed that exposure or not.

What currency do businesses actually use to pay overseas suppliers?

Despite dealing with suppliers who operate in their own local currencies, most US small businesses still default to paying in dollars. PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard’s 2026 research found that 63% of internationally active US small businesses pay overseas suppliers primarily in US dollars, while only 4% pay predominantly in the supplier’s own local currency. The researchers note this is not a neutral choice: paying in dollars when a supplier operates in another currency effectively transfers the currency conversion cost and exchange-rate risk onto the supplier, since the supplier is the one who has to convert the dollars it receives back into its own operating currency.

Figure 2: Share of internationally active US small businesses paying overseas suppliers primarily in US dollars versus primarily in the supplier’s own currency. Source: PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard, “The Cross-Border Opportunity” (535 US small businesses, February 2026).

Businesses that already operate across multiple currencies are, unsurprisingly, the ones most likely to want broader currency capabilities from their payment provider, per the same research; firms still paying exclusively in dollars are far less likely to see the need. That gap suggests a lot of dollar-only invoicing is inertia rather than a deliberate decision. It is simply what a business’s existing invoicing setup already does by default, not a choice weighed against the alternative on a per-supplier basis.

Why does the US dollar dominate cross-border invoicing, even outside the US?

The dollar’s grip on cross-border invoicing is not just a US small-business habit; it shows up at the level of world trade as a whole. Excluding trade within the eurozone itself, the US dollar was used to invoice roughly 60% of global exports and imports in 2023, according to updated research by Emine Boz, Gita Gopinath, and coauthors, cited in a European Central Bank publication on global trade invoicing patterns from June 2025. The euro was a distant second at about 25% of that same trade. For context, the US accounts for a much smaller share of global trade volume than its dollar-invoicing share, a gap researchers call the “dominant currency paradigm,” where a small number of currencies do far more invoicing work than the underlying trade flows of their home economies would predict.

That academic pattern has a very practical consequence for a small business invoicing a client or paying a supplier abroad: even when neither party is American, the US dollar is often the currency both sides already have some infrastructure to handle, which is part of why it keeps getting chosen as the default, not necessarily because either party actually prefers holding dollars.

How much does currency conversion actually cost on a cross-border invoice?

Currency conversion is rarely free, and the fee is frequently buried inside an exchange rate markup rather than itemized as a separate line. The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide report put the global average cost of sending a cross-border payment at 6.36% of the amount sent in the third quarter of 2025, more than double the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal target of 3%. That cost is not evenly distributed by destination: Sub-Saharan Africa, the report’s most expensive tracked region, averaged 8.78% in the first quarter of 2025 against a 6.49% global average that same quarter, well above the global figure.

Figure 3: Average cost of a cross-border payment as a share of the amount sent, global average versus the priciest tracked region, Q1 2025. Source: World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide (Q1 2025 data).

On a $5,000 cross-border invoice, a 6.36% cost works out to roughly $318 lost to fees and exchange-rate markup before either party sees it as a line item on a statement. Multiplied across a year of recurring supplier payments or client invoices, that is real money leaking out of a small business’s margin, and it is a cost that stays largely invisible until someone actually goes looking for it, rather than trusting the quoted exchange rate at face value.

That fee structure is also part of why cross-border invoicing rules are tightening in some markets. The European Union’s rolling e-invoicing mandates, which require structured, machine-readable invoices for VAT reporting across member states as they phase in over the next few years, are partly aimed at making the underlying transaction, currency included, visible to tax authorities in something closer to real time, instead of relying on a supplier’s own bank statement to reconstruct what a cross-border invoice actually cost once conversion fees were taken out.

What stands out most in the World Bank’s own tracking is how flat the global average has stayed despite that kind of regulatory attention. It ran 6.35% in the first quarter of 2024, rose slightly to 6.65% by the second quarter that year, settled around 6.49% through late 2024 and early 2025, then eased to 6.36% by the third quarter of 2025. Two years of reported progress toward cheaper cross-border payments has moved the global average by roughly three-tenths of a percentage point, nowhere close to the 3% target the industry has been citing for years.

Figure 4: Global average cost of a cross-border payment, quarterly, Q1 2024 through Q3 2025. Source: World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide (quarterly issues, 2024-2025).

None of that fee sits in one single place a small business can simply negotiate away. Part of it is the exchange rate markup itself, part of it is a flat transfer fee, and part of it depends on which rail actually carries the money, an international wire, a card network, or a payment link that settles into a local account. Two invoices for the identical amount, in the identical currency, can still land at noticeably different net costs purely based on which of those rails carried the payment, which is a separate question from the currency decision covered above but compounds directly on top of it.

What is slowing cross-border invoice payments down the most?

Cost is not actually the complaint small businesses raise most often about paying or getting paid across borders; speed is. 43% of small businesses that pay suppliers abroad name faster processing and settlement as their single top priority for improving cross-border payments, ahead of lower fees or better transparency, according to PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard’s 2026 research.

Figure 5: Share of internationally active US small businesses naming faster processing and settlement as their top priority for improving cross-border payments, 2026. Source: PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard, “The Cross-Border Opportunity” (535 US small businesses, February 2026).

That priority on speed has not settled the question of who should actually handle the payment. More than one in four of the most internationally active small businesses in the survey, the ones sourcing most heavily abroad, said they remain open to switching cross-border payment providers, according to the same PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard research, a sign that even an established provider relationship leaves room for a faster or cheaper alternative to win the business. None of this is unique to how much is being paid; it sits alongside the broader pattern BillyPaid has covered in Late Payment Statistics 2026, where speed of settlement, not just the eventual amount collected, is consistently the variable businesses care about most.

Invoice Currency at a Glance

Metric	Value	Source
US small businesses sourcing internationally	57%	PYMNTS/Mastercard, 2026
$1M-$10M revenue firms sourcing internationally	73%	PYMNTS/Mastercard, 2026
Pay overseas suppliers primarily in USD	63%	PYMNTS/Mastercard, 2026
Pay overseas suppliers primarily in local currency	4%	PYMNTS/Mastercard, 2026
Global average cross-border payment cost	6.36%	World Bank RPW, Q3 2025
Cite payment speed as top cross-border priority	43%	PYMNTS/Mastercard, 2026

Table 1: Cross-border invoice currency and payment data at a glance. Sources: PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard, “The Cross-Border Opportunity” (2026); World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Issue 54 (September 2025).

The Bottom Line

The data points to a small business default that has not caught up with small business reality. More small businesses than ever are sourcing internationally, 57% overall and 73% among the $1 million to $10 million revenue tier, yet 63% of them keep paying in US dollars regardless of what currency their supplier actually operates in, and only 4% deliberately match the supplier’s own currency. That default is not free: cross-border payments cost 6.36% of the amount sent on average, a figure that has barely budged in two years, and it quietly shifts conversion risk onto whichever side of the transaction is least equipped to negotiate around it. None of this requires a business to overhaul how it invoices overnight. It does mean that the currency field on a cross-border invoice deserves the same deliberate attention as the payment term or the due date, since a currency chosen out of habit is a recurring cost, not a one-time decision. A BillyPaid invoice makes the currency, due date, and payment link explicit on every bill sent, whether the client or supplier on the other end is across the street or across an ocean.

Frequently Asked Questions

What currency do small businesses use to pay overseas suppliers? 63% of US small businesses that source internationally pay overseas suppliers primarily in US dollars, and only 4% pay predominantly in the supplier’s own local currency, according to a 2026 PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard study of 535 US small businesses. The rest mix currencies depending on the supplier relationship.

How many small businesses actually invoice or pay across borders? 57% of US small businesses now source products or services from international suppliers, and that share rises to 73% among businesses generating $1 million to $10 million a year, according to PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard’s 2026 research, based on a February 2026 survey of 535 firms.

How much does currency conversion actually cost on a cross-border invoice? The global average cost of a cross-border payment was 6.36% of the amount sent in the third quarter of 2025, more than double the United Nations’ 3% target, according to the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide report. Costs run well above that average in the priciest corridors: Sub-Saharan Africa, the most expensive region the World Bank tracks, averaged 8.78% in the first quarter of 2025 against a 6.49% global average that same quarter.

What is the biggest complaint small businesses have about cross-border invoice payments? Speed. 43% of small businesses that pay suppliers abroad name faster processing and settlement as their top priority for improving cross-border payments, according to PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard’s 2026 research, ahead of cost or transparency concerns.

Sources and References

1. PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard, “The Cross-Border Opportunity: What Global Sourcing by US SMBs Means for Payment Providers” (535 US small businesses, survey conducted February 12-24, 2026), international sourcing rates, payment currency practices, and top improvement priorities.
2. European Central Bank, “Global trade invoicing patterns: new insights and the influence of geopolitics” (June 2025), dollar and euro invoicing share of world trade excluding the eurozone, based on Boz et al. (2025).
3. World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Issue 54 (September 2025) and prior quarterly issues, global average and regional cross-border payment costs, quarterly cost trend 2024-2025.

Note: All figures verified as of September 2026.