Inward transfers to Liberia — a category dominated by remittances from Liberians abroad, along with grants — totaled about US$941 million in 2025, up from US$885 million a year earlier, according to balance-of-payments data published by the Central Bank of Liberia (CBL).
In the fourth quarter alone, secondary income reached US$225.4 million, up about 11 percent from a year earlier. It was the single largest positive item in Liberia's external accounts, and by a wide margin — larger than the country's quarterly earnings from any individual export.
These transfers are what kept Liberia's current account in surplus for the year. With the goods balance running a deficit of about US$281 million, and services and investment income both negative, the inflow of transfers more than covered the gaps — the difference between an external surplus and a deficit, on the CBL's accounting.
Remittances are a structural pillar of the Liberian economy. They support household consumption directly, reaching families across the country and into rural areas that formal employment and banking often do not. And they provide a source of foreign exchange that is far steadier than commodity export earnings, which swing with global prices — a stabilizing counterweight in the balance of payments.
The flows are rooted in Liberia's large diaspora, concentrated in the United States and across West Africa, built up over generations and swelled by the displacement of the civil-war years. Money sent home from these communities has long outweighed many domestic income sources for ordinary families.
Increasingly, that money moves digitally. The spread of mobile money and the launch in December 2025 of the CBL's interoperable instant-payment system, which lets the country's two big mobile-money networks transfer to each other in real time, is reshaping how remittances are received and spent — potentially lowering costs and pulling more of the flows into traceable, formal channels.
That steadiness is also a dependence. An economy that relies on transfers from its diaspora to balance its external accounts is exposed to conditions in the countries where those Liberians live and work — their employment, immigration policy, and the fees charged to send money home, which remain high across much of the remittance corridor into West Africa.
The scale of the flows underscores a point often lost in coverage focused on mines and plantations: for many Liberian households, money sent home from abroad is a more important source of income than anything produced domestically.
What to watch is whether transfer inflows remain resilient through 2026, whether digital channels lower costs and capture more of the flows, and how exposed the external accounts would be if remittances softened.
