If your a Canadian with a PayPal account with US Dollars in it, you likely will want to transfer it to your Canadian bank and keep the money in USD. The problem is PayPal defaults all Canadian bank accounts to Canadian Dollars and tells you that this cannot be changed. That means you have to pay PayPal’s “exchange rate” (which they make money on) + a 2.5% fee, which means you will likely loose 3% or more. After giving PayPal 3% to 5% of the transaction already, that means you will be losing between 6% and 8% which can be real money.
This is frustrating but there is an easy way around it, simply use the Canadian Banks US “Transit Number”. What the heck is that you ask? How can Canadian Banks have US “Transit Numbers”, well nearly all Canadian Banks of scale (certainly the ‘big five’, RBC, CIBC, TD, BMO and Scotia, ) have US operations so they have US transit numbers.
HOW TO ADD A CANADIAN BANKS US DOLLAR ACCOUNT TO PAYPAL:
Sign into PayPal- Click WALLET (in the top menu)
- Click the LINK A BANK (large graphic)
- Click the ADD button (at the bottom)
- Click the small I HAVE A DIFFERENT BANK link (top left, above the banks logos)
- Change the COUNTRY to UNITED STATES (yes, us US even though this is for a Canadian Bank)
- Type in the name of the bank
- Surf to bank-code.net/routing-numbers and enter just the name of your bank, then click SEARCH
- Copy the ROUTING NUMBER from Bank-Code.net in the PayPal ROUTING NUMBER field
- In the ACCOUNT NUMBER field enter BOTH you Canadian bank’s ‘transit number’+’account number’
- Click CONTINUE
- Complete the confirmation process
- Enjoy!
We created a video to show you the process to add Canadian Banks’ US dollar account to your PayPal account:
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