What Migration Sends Home
Overseas Filipinos sent back $41.56 billion in 2025 — 5.33 times what the country received in net foreign direct investment, and equal to 32.1% of everything it exported. This page is about the money, because the money is what is publicly countable.
Remittances are not a supplement to the Philippine economy. At 5.33 times net foreign direct investment, they are one of its main external inflows — and they have been shrinking as a share of it for twenty years.
- $41.56 billion arrived in 2025, worth 8.53% of GDP. That share peaked at 12.78% in 2005 and has fallen since — not because remittances shrank, but because the economy grew faster.
- They are equal to 32.1% of all goods and services the country exports. Nearly a third as much again on top of everything sold abroad.
- The flow has grown 339.0 million dollars in 1977 to $41.56 billion now, across 49 years without a single sustained reversal — including through 2008 and 2020.
- Against five other large remittance economies the Philippines ranks 2 of 6 by share of GDP. India receives $150.7 billion — four times as much money, worth 3.81% of its economy.
Forty-Nine Years Of Growth
Remittance inflows since 1977. The striking property is not the level but the shape: it goes up through every crisis in the period.
2025 inflow
Up from $339.0M in 1977.
Growth multiple
In nominal dollars over 49 years. Not inflation-adjusted, and the page does not claim it is.
Through the crises
2008 and 2020 both dented FDI and exports. Neither produced a sustained fall here — migrants send more when home needs more, which is the opposite of how investment behaves.
Bigger Than Investment
The comparison that says what remittances actually are in this economy. Foreign direct investment gets the policy attention; this gets the money.
Against net FDI
In 2025. Remittances have exceeded net FDI in every year on record.
Against exports
Of all goods and services exported. Almost a third as much again on top of everything the country sells abroad.
Share of GDP
Down from 12.78% at the 2005 peak — the economy grew faster than the remittances did.
Against Other Remittance Economies
Six large receivers at 2025, by share of GDP rather than by dollars. Dollars would just rank by country size and tell you nothing.
Rank by share
At 8.53% of GDP.
India, by dollars
Four times the Philippine inflow in absolute terms.
India, by share
And less than half the Philippine share of GDP. The same money means very different things to different economies.
The Number Nobody Publishes Openly
Every figure above is money. None is people, and that is not an editorial choice.
Net migration is an estimate
The World Bank derives it from five-year interpolations between census rounds. Three years in the series come back positive — 1998, 2010 and 2012 — not because migration reversed but because the residual can flip. Those are recorded rather than clipped to zero, because clipping would hide how coarse the series is.
The direction is not in doubt
Net outflow over the last decade of data comes to about 1,570,579 people. The level is soft; the sign is not.
But not who, or where, or doing what
Sex, age, occupation, destination and region of origin are all published by DMW — in annual PDF compendiums, not as a series. Nothing here can speak to them.
What This Page Does Not Cover
The version this replaces claimed 2.19M OFWs, 57.2% female, P262B remitted and P129K per worker, plus charts of age, occupation, destination country and region of origin.
The headcount
PSA's Survey on Overseas Filipinos is the source, and psa.gov.ph sits behind a managed challenge that scripts do not pass. Without a headcount, 'average remittance per worker' cannot be computed either — so neither appears.
Destination and occupation
DMW's deployment statistics carry both, as PDF tables per year. Extracting them is a real project; approximating them is what produced the page this replaces.
Peso figures
The old page reported remittances in pesos. The World Bank publishes them in US dollars, and converting needs a rate choice this analysis does not want to bury in a headline. Everything here is in dollars and says so.
Method
One fetcher, three CSVs, via the shared helper in data/_lib/worldbank.py.
Share and dollars are cross-checked
The World Bank publishes remittances in dollars and as a share of GDP separately. A check divides the first by GDP and fails if it disagrees with the second — if one is revised without the other, that is where it shows.
Vietnam is deliberately absent
It has only five points of remittances-as-%-of-GDP, 2000 to 2004. Including it pinned the like-for-like peer comparison to 2004 and would have presented a twenty-year-old snapshot as current. A check now fails if any peer does the same.
Sign convention is asserted
Net migration must stay overwhelmingly negative. A flipped sign is easy to miss because the magnitudes stay plausible either way.
Nominal, not real
Dollar figures are nominal. The growth multiple over 49 years is therefore not a real-terms claim, and the page says so where it appears.
Like-for-like comparison
The peer table uses the latest year every country has, not each country's own latest print.
Verification
Nine assertions in checks.sql, and every figure bound to a query in facts.sql.
Key Findings & Summary
- Overseas Filipinos sent home $41.56 billion in 2025, worth 8.53% of GDP.
- That is 5.33 times net foreign direct investment and 32.1% of all exports. Remittances are a primary external inflow, not a supplement.
- The share of GDP peaked at 12.78% in 2005 and has fallen since — the economy grew faster, not the remittances smaller.
- Among six large remittance economies the Philippines is 2 of 6 by share of GDP, while India receives $150.7 billion — four times the money, at 3.81% of its economy.
- No figure here is a headcount. How many Filipinos work abroad, what they do and where they go all sit in DMW and PSA publications that no script can reach.
Sources & Citations
Every figure on this page traces to one of these, through a CSV in
data/ph-ofw/. Each is checked against its source query on every
build.
World Bank World Development IndicatorsSecondary
Remittance inflows, share of GDP, net migration, FDI and exports, 1977-2025 — Remittances compiled from BSP balance-of-payments reporting
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Prefer the plain-English version?
I wrote a companion post — “Five Times More Than The Investors Send” — in simple, everyday words.