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Paying fees upfront starts with requesting a signed fee quote from Circle, then submitting that quote with the burn in a single transaction on the source blockchain. Circle honors the quoted price, so the recipient receives the full transferred amount. For a full walkthrough, see Transfer USDC with upfront fees.

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Transfer flow with upfront fees

1

Request a quote

Request an upfront fee quote from the Quote API for the fees you want to pay upfront: the Forwarding Service fee, the Fast Transfer fee, or both. See Paying the fee for the available fee tokens.
2

Receive a signed quote

Circle returns a signed, time-bound quote that prices each fee and includes a signedQuote blob.
3

Approve USDC

Approve TokenMessengerWithFees to spend the USDC amount you’re transferring, plus the quoted fee if you’re paying it in USDC. The contract pulls the transfer amount for the burn and, if applicable, the fee amount.
4

Submit the burn

Call depositForBurnWithFees (or depositForBurnWithHookAndFees) on TokenMessengerWithFees, passing the signed quote along with the standard depositForBurn parameters, and pay the quoted fee amount: attach it as the transaction’s native value, or rely on the USDC approval from the previous step.
5

Fee is collected and tokens are burned

The contract verifies the quote, collects the fee, and then delegates to TokenMessengerV2 to complete the CCTP burn.
6

Full amount is minted

Circle attests the transfer with no fee deducted at mint, and the full amount is minted to the recipient.

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Paying the fee

The token you selected on the quote request decides where the fee comes from:
  • Native gas token (default): attach the quoted amount as the transaction’s native value.
  • USDC: request the quote with feeToken set to the USDC address, then approve TokenMessengerWithFees to spend the quoted fee before you submit. This fee approval is on top of the USDC you’re transferring, so approve the transfer amount plus the quoted fee.

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Forwarding with upfront fees

When a quote includes a FORWARD fee, the transfer is forwarded on the destination blockchain the same way as any other Forwarding Service transfer, except that the forwarding fee isn’t deducted from the transferred amount. What changes is how you supply the hook data. Forwarding requires a valid cctp-forward hook in the submitted hook data. depositForBurnWithFees builds this hook for you automatically, as long as you request the quote without passing hookData. For custom hook data, use depositForBurnWithHookAndFees and submit the same hookData you used to request the quote. For the hook structure, including how to append your own frame, see Forwarding Service hook format.