American Dollars in the Philippines
Written on Apr 14, 2026
I can use American dollars in very few places in the Philippines. In fact, the Royal Subic store at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone is the only place I know of that accepts them. I can use dollars or pesos to pay for my groceries.
Since American dollars have to be pristine, I prefer to pay in pesos, which don't have to be pristine. I use my credit card most of the time because I get two percent cash back for purchases anywhere.
Even if I specify pesos, they automatically get converted to pesos at the current exchange rate.
Banking
When I moved to the Philippines in 2006, I used Philippine National Bank for my direct deposits, which were really remittances sent by a partner bank in the United States, with a fee of $7.00 per deposit.
I had deposited the profit of selling my house in Arizona at one of their branches in Los Angeles before we left the United States. At the time, there weren't many other choices.
I changed banks in the Philippines a couple of times. While I was stuck in Hawaii during the pandemic, I switched my direct deposit account to Navy Federal Credit Union in the United States.
Paying Bills
Until late last year, we paid our bills the old-fashioned way. We converted dollars to pesos and paid them at the appropriate locations. I'm talking about electricity, water, and Internet. I sent myself most of my money through Western Union.
I now use GCash to pay the bills. I use Sendwave on my phone to transfer enough dollars to my GCash wallet, with conversion, to pay the same bills online. The exchange rate is lower and there's a small fee, so I usually transfer less than $200 a month to GCash.
Foreign Currency Conversion
There are still places in the Philippines that won't accept anything but pesos, especially at the public markets. For that reason alone, I still have to send dollars to myself every month. Regardless of where we exchange it, we never get the full exchange rate.
Today, I send far less to myself through Western Union. Without doing math, I estimate it went from 100 percent to about 25 percent of me and my wife's combined pensions.
The combination of using GCash and a credit card makes paying bills and shopping far easier than it was before the pandemic. The only way it could get any easier is if every place in the Philippines would accept one or the other.
Image by benscripps from Pixabay