- Jamaica received US$286.3 million in remittances in May 2025, up 5.9%.
- May is the strongest single month of 2025 by both value and growth rate.
- US share of inflows declined further to 68.2%, from 68.7% in May 2024.
- Canada’s share rose to 9.6%, its highest reading in the 2025 series.
- January–May 2025 cumulative total reached US$1,421.5 million, up 3.6%.
- Mexico’s remittances fell 8.3%; Jamaica’s outperformance widened sharply.
May 2025 produced Jamaica’s strongest remittance result of the year, both in absolute value at US$286.3 million and in year-on-year growth at 5.9% — a reading that, alongside a second consecutive month of declining US corridor concentration, suggests the diaspora income stream is not only growing but quietly diversifying its geographic base.
Jamaica received US$286.3 million in net remittance inflows in May 2025, a 5.9% increase on the US$270.3 million recorded in May 2024, according to the Bank of Jamaica’s Remittance Bulletin for May 2025. The result marks the highest single-month remittance total and the fastest year-on-year growth rate recorded so far in 2025, extending a positive momentum that has characterised every month of the year since January. The January-to-May 2025 cumulative total reached US$1,421.5 million — up 3.6% year-on-year — with the five-month total now running substantially ahead of 2024’s pace at the same stage and on a trajectory that could support full-year inflows above the 2024 annual total of US$3,357.4 million.
May’s Outperformance: What Drove the 5.9% Growth?
May’s 5.9% growth rate — roughly double March’s 1.3% and more than double January’s 2.5% — reflects several converging factors that typically align in this period. The North American summer season begins in earnest in May, bringing stronger employment and earnings for Jamaican diaspora workers in the hospitality, landscaping, construction, and domestic services sectors that constitute a significant part of the Canadian and American Jamaican labour market. Memorial Day in the United States, falling in late May, typically marks the beginning of the high-earnings summer period for service-sector workers, who historically increase transfer frequency when their earnings grow.
Additionally, May marks the start of the back-to-school savings cycle for Jamaican families preparing for the September term. Parents and grandparents receiving remittances from abroad begin accumulating school fee reserves, uniform budgets, and stationery funds in May, creating a pull on diaspora transfer behaviour that complements the supply-side boost from higher summer earnings. The combination of higher sender capacity and clearer recipient demand makes May one of the structurally stronger months in the annual remittance calendar, a pattern that the 2025 data confirms with the highest monthly total of the year to date.
US Corridor Share Declines for a Second Month
The United States accounted for 68.2% of Jamaica’s remittance inflows in May 2025, down from 68.7% in May 2024 — a year-on-year decline of 0.5 percentage points. This is the second consecutive month in which the US share has declined year-on-year, following April’s 0.8 percentage-point decline. Together, April and May represent a meaningful shift from the trend of the first three months of 2025, when the US share rose by an average of approximately 3 percentage points year-on-year across January, February, and March.
The pattern emerging across the five months of 2025 is one of volatile US share dynamics: a sharp upward surge in Q1 that generated genuine concentration risk concern, followed by a moderation in April and May as other corridors recovered. Two consecutive months of US share decline do not constitute a confirmed reversal of the longer-term concentration trend — a single quarter of data is insufficient to rewrite a structural narrative that has been building over several years — but they do reduce the urgency of the concentration risk assessment that dominated the Q1 2025 remittance narrative.
Canada’s Rising Share: A Noteworthy Shift
Canada’s share of Jamaica’s remittance inflows reached 9.6% in May 2025, its highest reading in the 2025 data series and a notable increase from the 8.0% recorded in March and 8.3% in February. The United Kingdom accounted for 11.5% and the Cayman Islands for 6.3%, both broadly consistent with recent months. Canada’s strengthening share is consistent with the dynamics of the Jamaican-Canadian community, which is concentrated in the Greater Toronto Area and has been growing through both direct immigration and family sponsorship channels.
The Canadian summer labour market also contributes to the May uptick: Jamaicans employed in Canada’s agricultural Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) typically begin their season in late spring, with initial earnings generating transfer activity in May and June. Canada hosts approximately 10,000 Jamaican seasonal agricultural workers annually through the programme — the largest single-country contingent in the SAWP — and their transfer behaviour creates a distinctive seasonal pattern in the Canada-to-Jamaica remittance corridor that is visible in the May data.
Mexico’s Decline: An Instructive Contrast
The regional comparison data in May’s BOJ bulletin highlights Mexico’s sharp deterioration. Mexico’s January-to-May 2025 remittance inflows declined by 8.3% year-on-year — a reversal of extraordinary magnitude for the world’s largest single-country remittance recipient. Mexico’s decline in the period reflects several factors: the strength of the Mexican peso against the US dollar reduced the Jamaican-equivalent purchasing power incentive for transfers (Mexican recipients receive fewer pesos per dollar transferred when the peso is strong); enforcement uncertainty affecting undocumented Salvadoran and Mexican workers in the United States suppressed transfer confidence; and the comparison base from 2024 was elevated due to exceptional inflows that year.
Against Mexico’s -8.3%, Jamaica’s +5.9% in May and +3.6% year-to-date represents a significant relative outperformance. This outperformance is partly structural — Jamaica’s diaspora communities in the US, UK, Canada, and Cayman Islands have a different demographic and employment profile from Mexico’s predominantly agricultural and construction workforce — and partly reflects the strength of the formal remittance channel development that the BOJ has consistently noted in its bulletins. El Salvador’s 19.2% and Guatemala’s 11.4% growth for the January-to-May period continued to outpace Jamaica, driven by the dynamics discussed in earlier bulletins, but Jamaica’s 3.6% positive reading in a regional context where Mexico is sharply negative positions the island’s remittance sector as one of the more resilient in the region.
Five Months In: The 2025 Remittance Scorecard
The January-to-May 2025 remittance data paints a broadly constructive picture. Monthly inflows have ranged from US$238.0 million (February seasonal trough) to US$286.3 million (May peak), with all five months positive year-on-year. The cumulative total of US$1,421.5 million is 3.6% above the same five-month period in 2024, and the fiscal year-to-date (April-May 2025) figure of US$563.2 million is 4.2% above the corresponding 2024 period — a sign that the new fiscal year has opened on a stronger footing than the one that just concluded with a marginal -0.1% full-year decline.
For Jamaica’s housing market, the five-month picture is supportive. At US$1,421.5 million received between January and May, the diaspora income flow is running at approximately US$284 million per month on average — a baseline that, combined with strong domestic employment and the BOJ’s broadly stable interest rate environment, provides a supportive macroeconomic backdrop for residential property transactions. Remittance-backed buyers — who rely on diaspora transfers to fund deposits, construction materials, or mortgage servicing — are among the most consistent demand segments in Jamaica’s residential market, and the 2025 data suggests that this segment’s purchasing power is holding steady or improving. The June bulletin will provide the next data point as the summer season approaches its peak.
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