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What do my account fees cost me in a year?
$216
Turn off a fee and watch the yearly cost drop.
This is still the sample. Change a number to see your own.
That’s 0.45% of your monthly income going to bank fees
If that same monthly amount earned an unchanged 7%. A sample, not a forecast.
The extra $956 is what the sample rate would add. It is not money already lost.
The checked fees add up to $216 a year.
Written by Elizabeth Stein
With the calculator's default fees, a $10 monthly maintenance fee and an $8 out-of-network ATM fee, both enabled, come to $18 a month, $216 a year. Over five years that's $1,080 in fees alone, and if that same $18 a month had gone into an account earning 7% instead, it would have grown to about $1,289, roughly $209 more than the fees themselves added up to. Over ten years the fees total $2,160, against roughly $3,116 if invested at the same rate, a gap of about $956 that the fees quietly cost on top of the fees.
Finance Quest is educational. It is not financial advice, and no calculator here knows your full situation.
Eight dollars here, twelve there, looks trivial against a paycheck of a few thousand dollars. It stops looking trivial once it's multiplied by twelve months, and stops looking trivial a second time once you add what that same money would have earned sitting in an account that pays you instead of charging you. The fee itself is rarely the real cost. The real cost is what it would have grown into if it had gone somewhere else.
Bankrate's 2025 Checking Account and ATM Fee Study found an average monthly maintenance fee of $5.47 on checking accounts that pay no interest and $15.65 on interest checking. Using an out-of-network ATM cost $4.86 per withdrawal on average, counting both banks' charges, and the average overdraft fee was $26.77. Many accounts charge no monthly fee at all, so your own total depends on which fees your account has and how often you trigger them.
Multiply the monthly fee by 12 to get the yearly cost, then by the number of years. For example, $16 a month in ATM fees for six years is $16 x 12 x 6 = $1,152. If you have several fees, add them into one monthly total first. The calculator does this for you and also shows what the same money would have grown to if it had been invested instead.
Often yes. Many banks waive it if you maintain a minimum balance, set up a qualifying direct deposit, or hold multiple accounts with them. It's worth checking your bank's specific requirements before assuming the fee is unavoidable, or before switching to an online bank that may not charge one at all.
Many charge no monthly maintenance fee and some reimburse out-of-network ATM fees, since they have no branch network to fund. Read the fee schedule directly rather than assuming, since some still charge for things like wire transfers or paper statements.
Overdraft fees range from $0 at some banks to about $35 per occurrence at others. Where they apply, a few a year can dwarf a routine fee like a monthly maintenance charge. Setting up low-balance alerts or linking a backup account for overdraft protection usually costs nothing and avoids the largest single fee most checking accounts charge.