Short answer. Overcharging is a prohibited recruitment practice, not a private billing dispute. Article 34 makes it unlawful for a licensee to charge or accept, directly or indirectly, any amount greater than the schedule of allowable fees prescribed by the Secretary of Labor. Your first task is proving what you actually paid.
What the law says
To charge or accept, directly or indirectly, any amount greater than that specified in the schedule of allowable fees prescribed by the Secretary of Labor
Labor Code, Article 34 — Prohibited Recruitment Practices. Read the full provision →
“Directly or indirectly” is the important phrase
Overcharging is rarely done by writing a large number on one receipt. It is done by splitting the amount across a training fee, a medical fee, a documentation fee and a payment to some affiliated company that shares the agency's address; or by a deduction from the first months of salary that nobody described as a placement fee at all. The article reaches all of it. What counts is the total the recruitment extracted from you and where it ended up, not how the agency chose to describe each instalment.
The ceiling is set outside the article
The provision does not itself name a peso figure. It forbids charging more than the schedule of allowable fees prescribed by the Secretary of Labor, and that schedule is issued separately and revised from time to time, with different limits for different kinds of deployment. So the first question in any overcharging complaint is which schedule applied to your placement on the date you paid. Do not rely on a figure a friend or a Facebook group quotes; the applicable schedule is a document, and the comparison has to be made against it.
Build the total before you argue about it
Write out every payment in order: date, amount, who received it, what it was called, and what document records it. Include the payments that did not go to the agency's own counter, because those are usually where the excess is hiding. Receipts, bank and e-wallet histories, remittance stubs and messages arranging each payment all belong in the list. An agency confronted with a dated ledger it cannot dispute is in a very different position from one answering a complaint that says only that the charges felt too high.
It is two claims, not one
Charging above the schedule is a prohibited practice that exposes the licensee to action on its licence, and separately it means money left your hands that should not have. Those run on different tracks, and pursuing one does not settle the other, so it is worth saying plainly at the outset that you want both addressed. Bring the ledger, the licence details of the agency, and your contract to whoever advises you — the recoverable amount usually turns on documents you already hold rather than on anything new.