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Every IRM record carries the country of the remitting party in the 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.
remitterCountry is alpha-3, not alpha-2. The value for the United Arab Emirates is ARE, not AE. Matching on two-letter codes will silently miss every record.

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 map remitterCountry 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)

Machine-readable list

Country Codes

Usage guidelines

  • 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 remitterCountry returns
  • 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 KOR is “Korea, Republic of” and VNM is “Viet Nam”
  • remitterCountry is 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. Treat UNKNOWN as “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 ARE routinely settles in USD; see Currency Codes
  • 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 Codes are withdrawn when a country ceases to exist or renames, and withdrawn codes are not reassigned for at least 50 years
  • Historical remittances can therefore carry a code that is no longer current. Keep withdrawn codes in your lookup rather than rejecting them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

Source: ISO 3166 Country Codes, maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency · Last reviewed: 17 August 2026