A Guide To Western Union's US Stores

It's fair to say that, no matter where you live in the United States, a Western Union store is probably no more than a stone's throw away.

Offering an impressive number of physical locations across the country — from Fairbanks in Alaska all the down to the Florida Keys and everywhere in between — you'll have plenty of options when it comes to sending and receiving cash and money orders and paying your bills with Western Union.

Take a look at our in-depth guide to discover where you need to go and what your best alternatives might be:

With as many as 4,200 physical locations across the US as of 2021, Western Union is a service that deserves your attention when it comes to sending or receiving money within the US or abroad, or simply paying the bills.

Finding the right store to suit your needs is remarkably simple, as we'll explore below. Agent locations can very often be found in commercial shopping districts, and are very often in partnership with brick-and-mortar retailers such as Walgreens and Walmart.

However, before going ahead and sending money with Western Union, it's worth considering your options more closely, as Western Union is not the best service for everybody's needs. Some locations, for example, don't offer the full range of services or may be more expensive than you realise, meaning you might do well to look elsewhere when it comes to sending money.

What Stores Does Western Union Have in the US?

As an American, finding the Western Union agent location that best suits your needs is a very straightforward process. To do so, you'll simply need to do the following:

• Go to the 'Find a Location' tool on Western Union's website;
• Enter either your address, ZIP/postal code, city, or state into the location search box on the right;
• Select which service you're looking to use (i.e. to pay bills, send/receive cash, etc.);
• Select 'Continue';
• Find the location that's nearest to you using the list and/or map.

If you live in one of the following major US cities, you can find the main Western Union location for your respective city in the list below:

How To Send Money From a Western Union Location

Once you've found a Western Union store or agent location that's conveniently located near you, you'll probably find that the next step — transferring the money — will be similarly straightforward.

To make use of Western Union's in-store services — whether they be paying for a transfer, picking up cash, or paying a bill — you will need to follow three basic steps. While we'll be focusing on the process of sending money with Western Union, the following steps are more or less identical for cash pickups and bill payments:

Is Western Union Right For You?

Without a doubt, sending money with Western Union is easy and relatively fast. However, it's not the cheapest service out there — neither for bank deposits nor for cash pickup options.

This is because Western Union charges a rather high combination of fixed fees and commissions, as well as a hefty exchange rate margin — the difference between the exchange rate that Western Union will charge you and the one at which it trades itself, known as the mid-market exchange rate.

As a result, Western Union tends to come out far behind its competitors when it comes to the pricing of international money transfers and is only marginally cheaper than sending the money through your bank directly. In fact, by delving into the results of hundreds of thousands of searches on Monito's comparison engine over the past 12 months, we found that Western Union wasn't once the cheapest provider for cash pickup transfers from the US. And while its closest competitor, MoneyGram, performed better (it was cheapest on 11% of searches over that period), it was the following services that came out on top as the cheapest alternatives, on average:

As such, if keeping the costs down when sending money abroad from the US is important to you, then we recommend you make use of one of the above services in place of Western Union to get the job done.

To discover which services currently offer the best deal and most competitive exchange rates for transfers abroad in real-time, run a search on Monito's comparison engine below.