The monthly fee is the price of the plan, not the price of the account. Of the 93 personal chequing accounts we track, 27 publish no monthly fee at all, and most of those still charge for something.
An account is sold on one number and used on about six. The fee is the one printed on the comparison page. The others are the transaction limit, what a transaction costs once you pass it, e-transfers, using another institution’s cash machine, and overdraft. Any of them can be larger than the fee over a year, and the ones that catch people are the ones tied to how they already bank rather than to what they chose.
The Six Numbers That Set the Price
| Charge | What we found across 93 chequing accounts |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | 92 publish one. It runs from $0 to $30.95, and the middle of the range is $7.50 a year in, $90 a year out. 27 charge nothing. |
| Transactions included | 51 are unlimited. 35 include a set number, the largest allowance being 40 a month. 7 publish nothing at all. |
| Each transaction past the limit | Only 37 of the 93 publish a figure. Where they do it runs from nothing to $5, and the middle is $1.25. |
| Interac e-Transfer | 52 publish a figure and 22 of those send them free. The rest charge up to $1.50 each. 41 accounts publish nothing. |
| Another institution’s cash machine | 63 publish a figure, from nothing to $5, and the middle is $2. This is on top of whatever the machine’s owner charges. |
| Overdraft | 23 publish a monthly charge, usually $5, and it is charged in any month you use the overdraft rather than once a year. |
The arithmetic that matters is not the fee against the fee. It is the fee plus your own usage against the same for the other account. Thirty five of these accounts include a set number of transactions, and a debit card used twice a week is about nine a month before a single bill is paid. An account at $4 a month with 12 transactions included costs more than one at $11 with no limit the moment ordinary life pushes you past the allowance, and the overage arrives as a line you did not plan for rather than as a price you agreed to.
The Waiver Is a Balance You Cannot Spend
Thirty six of the 93 publish a minimum balance that removes the monthly fee. It runs from $1,000 to $7,000 and the middle is $4,000. Banks present this as the fee being free, and it is worth seeing what is actually being traded: money held to hold a waiver is money not earning anything.
That makes the waiver comparable to an interest rate, and the comparison is worth doing because the answer is not obvious. Waiving a $16.95 fee by holding $4,000 saves $203.40 a year, which is the same as earning 5.09% on that $4,000. Across the 35 chequing accounts that publish both a fee and a waiver balance, the implied return runs from 1.19% to 7.80%, and the middle is 4.99%.
- The strongest is Vancity Essential Chequing at 7.80%, a $9.75 fee waived by holding $1,500.
- The weakest is the Servus Credit Union Personal Essential Plan at 1.19%, a $3.95 fee that asks for $4,000 to waive it.
Set that against the savings accounts we track, where the highest posted rate is 2.85% and the middle is 0.55%. The typical waiver beats every savings rate in the database, which is not what most people assume when they hear that a bank wants a minimum balance. The weak ones do not, and a $4,000 balance held to save $47.40 a year is money that would do better almost anywhere else.
Two things to check before treating a waiver as free money. The balance is usually tested on every day of the cycle, or on the lowest balance in it, rather than on an average, so dropping below the threshold once brings the whole fee back for that month. And the money has to be genuinely spare. A waiver return means nothing if holding the balance is what puts you into overdraft in a bad month.
What Almost Nobody Publishes
The most useful finding in this data is a set of blanks. Fifty six of the 93 accounts publish no figure for what a transaction costs once the included ones are used up, and that is the single charge most likely to appear on the statement of somebody who chose a cheap plan. Forty one publish no e-transfer fee. Sixty seven publish nothing about what a returned payment costs.
The 26 that do publish a returned item charge all record the same figure, $10, and every one of them is a large bank recording a per item overdraft handling charge rather than the full cost of a payment being refused. If a payment failing matters to you, that number has to come from the account agreement rather than from any comparison, including this one. We leave the field empty rather than filling it with an estimate, which is the rule the whole database runs on: a blank means the institution did not say, and a blank is never a zero.
Free Is Real, and It Is Usually Online
Twenty seven of these accounts charge no monthly fee, and the pattern is consistent. They are overwhelmingly online banks and credit unions rather than branch networks, they tend to include unlimited transactions rather than a set number, and what they trade away is a branch you can walk into and, in some cases, the ability to deposit cash easily.
That trade is worth stating plainly rather than treating as a catch. Somebody who has not been inside a branch in three years is paying up to $371 a year for the option. Somebody who deposits cash from a business, or who wants a person to talk to when something goes wrong, is buying something real. Neither is the wrong answer.
How to Work Out Your Own Number
- Count a normal month from your last statement. Debits, bill payments, withdrawals, e-transfers, and cash machine visits that were not your own institution’s.
- Take the monthly fee, multiply by twelve.
- Take the transactions above the included allowance, multiply by the extra transaction fee, multiply by twelve. If the account publishes no extra transaction fee, that is the number you have to go and find.
- Add e-transfers and out of network cash machine visits the same way.
- Add the overdraft monthly charge for the months you actually use it, not for all twelve.
- Only now compare it with the balance you would have to hold to waive the fee, and with what that balance could earn somewhere else.
The bank account comparison does this for all 245 accounts once you enter a month of normal use, and the chequing account page ranks them on the monthly fee alone, which is the right starting point and the wrong finishing point. If the fee is the only thing you care about, the accounts with no monthly fee are listed separately.
The Benchmark Weekly
One email a week. Elevated welcome offers while they are still open, new cards and accounts as they arrive, and any fee, rate or earn rate that moved, with the old figure and the new one. A quiet week gets no email.