A migrant worker remittance is the most common kind of remittances: money that a person working outside their home country sends back to relatives or dependants. The main entry covers the subject in full. The longer phrase is used, particularly by international organisations and in labour agreements, to separate these household transfers from other cross-border payments such as trade settlements, investment flows or payments between businesses.
The senders are migrant workers on temporary contracts and settled migrants alike. The transfers are typically small, regular and sent along a well-defined remittance corridor, for example from the Gulf states to South Asia or from the United States to Mexico. Recipients use the money mainly for food, housing, schooling and health care, which is why these flows tend to hold up, or even rise, when the home economy is in difficulty.
In balance of payments statistics, the transfers are counted with employees' earnings abroad to give a country's remittance inflow. Policy attention falls on the remittance cost paid by senders, which international targets aim to reduce, and on money that travels through informal channels such as hawala and goes unrecorded.