remitterCountry field, as an ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code: three letters, for example ARE for the United Arab Emirates and SGP for Singapore. This annexure lists all 249 codes assigned by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency.
Commonly seen codes
The counterparty countries that appear most often on Indian export remittances.Codes that are easy to confuse
Several alpha-3 codes are near-neighbours of each other, or of an unrelated country’s alpha-2 code. These are the ones worth a second look when you mapremitterCountry onto your own country master.
Full list by region
Regions follow the UN M49 grouping that ISO publishes alongside 3166-1. Codes are sorted alphabetically within each region.Asia (51)
Asia (51)
Europe (51)
Europe (51)
Africa (60)
Africa (60)
Americas (57)
Americas (57)
Oceania (29)
Oceania (29)
Not assigned to a region by ISO (1)
Not assigned to a region by ISO (1)
Machine-readable list
Country codes (JSON)
Country codes (JSON)
Country Codes
Usage guidelines
Code format
Code format
- Alpha-3 codes are exactly three uppercase letters (
string(3)) - Alpha-2 is the two-letter form of the same standard, listed above for cross-referencing with systems that use it; it is not what
remitterCountryreturns - Numeric-3 is the UN M49 numeric form, listed for reference; it is language-independent and stable across renamings
- Country names are reproduced exactly as ISO publishes them, so some read formally, for example
KORis “Korea, Republic of” andVNMis “Viet Nam”
Reading the field
Reading the field
remitterCountryis read-only reference data. It originates from the remitting bank’s advice, reaches us through DGFT, and is stored exactly as received — you never send it- When DGFT returns an IRM with no country on it, the field is stored as the literal string
UNKNOWN. TreatUNKNOWNas “not supplied”, not as a country code - Do not assume the code is present in the ISO list before you look it up. Fall back to displaying the raw value rather than dropping the record
- The remitter’s country is independent of the remittance currency. A remitter in
AREroutinely settles inUSD; see Currency Codes
Codes that change
Codes that change
- ISO 3166-1 is amended over time. Codes are withdrawn when a country ceases to exist or renames, and withdrawn codes are not reassigned for at least 50 years
- Historical remittances can therefore carry a code that is no longer current. Keep withdrawn codes in your lookup rather than rejecting them
- User-assigned codes (
AAA-AAZ,QMA-QZZ,XAA-XZZ,ZZA-ZZZ) are never issued by ISO and should not appear in this field
Used by
remitterCountryon every IRM record returned by Fetch IRM List and List Saved IRMs- The Remitter Country column in the IRM Excel export