Let’s get the headline out of the way first: no, free UK business bank accounts are not a scam. They genuinely exist, and you can run a business through one without ever paying a monthly account fee.

But, and it’s an important but, “free” almost always comes with caveats buried in the fine print. The monthly fee might be zero, while the things you actually do day to day (depositing cash, sending payments, foreign exchange) carry charges that vary a lot between providers. The “free” option isn’t always the cheapest one once you add it all up.

Below we walk through some of the best free business account deals available right now, then dig into the small print so you can work out which one genuinely suits your business.

Click here to check out the latest free banking offers

HSBC UK

HSBC is currently offering a £100 Amazon gift card when you sign up. The headline features are no monthly fees, free bank transfers, an optional overdraft, and access via app, online, branch and Post Office. They also accept cash deposits, so if you’re a business that handles cash, HSBC is worth a look.

Here’s what the basic account actually charges:

• Monthly account fee: Free
• Standard domestic digital transactions (made via business internet banking to other UK accounts): Free
• Debit card payments: Free
• Cash withdrawals in branch or Post Office: £1.50
• Cash deposits in branch or Post Office: 1.5% of the value deposited
• Cheque deposits: 50p per cheque

So the account fee is genuinely free, but the cash and cheque handling charges add up quickly, that 1.5% cash deposit fee is on the high side compared to others on this list.

Tide

Tide is currently offering £250 cashback when you become a customer. To qualify, you’ll need to set up two Direct Debits and spend a minimum of £100 on your Tide card within 30 days of opening the account.

Tide is one of the neobanks leading the UK business banking space right now. It’s app and online only, but a useful point in its favour: there are no hard credit checks, so if you have poor or limited credit history, Tide can be a realistic option.

The basic account is free, but worth knowing:

• The free plan includes only 5 free bank transfers per month
• The savings account offers up to 2% AER on the free tier, rising to around 4% on the higher-priced plans
• Cashback is only available on the most expensive plan
• Paid plans start at £12.49/month (billed monthly), unlocking more advanced features as you climb the tiers

If you just need the basics, it stays free, but you’ll likely outgrow five transfers a month fairly fast.

Airwallex

Airwallex offers a one-month free trial and an unusual pricing structure: you pay £0/month if you deposit at least £10,000 a month or hold a minimum £10,000 balance, otherwise it’s £19/month.

Where Airwallex shines is international payments. You can hold accounts in 20 different currencies, get interbank exchange rates, and run international batch transfers. If you run an online store taking payments in pounds, euros and dollars, this is a strong option.

Be aware the monthly fees climb steeply for the upper tiers, around £49/month for the Grow plan and just under £1,000/month for the Accelerate plan, which bundles a range of advanced features. As an app-and-online provider, it doesn’t make cash handling easy.

Starling Bank

Starling offers no monthly fee, free bank transfers and no overdraft. The catch is that the fees are tucked away in a PDF rather than laid out clearly on the website.

• Regular payments: Free
• CHAPS payments: £20 each (standard across the industry)
• Foreign exchange: Conversion fees apply (also fairly standard)
• Cash deposits (at the Post Office): 0.7% of the deposit, with a £3 minimum

That 0.7% cash deposit fee is roughly half of what HSBC charges, so if you regularly deposit cash, Starling works out noticeably cheaper. Unlike the app-only neobanks, Starling does let you pay in cash via the Post Office.

NatWest

NatWest is another high street option, and also runs Mettle, a separate account aimed more squarely at small businesses. The main NatWest account fees, like Starling’s, live in a long PDF.

• Free banking for two years from the date the account is opened
• After that, NatWest checks your turnover and starts charging fees, and if you exceed £100,000 in a 12-month period, they’ll start charging immediately
• Payments: £35 each, in and out
• Cash payments in and out: 95p per £100 (effectively 0.95% higher than Starling, lower than HSBC)

The standout advantage with NatWest is its large branch network. Depending on your circumstances, having someone to actually talk to in person can be genuinely useful.

Zempler Bank

Zempler is another neobank, and one of the most transparent on this list when it comes to fees, everything is laid out clearly rather than buried in a PDF.

Its Business Go plan is £0/month and includes:

• Full protection and online/in-app application
• UK telephone support
• Post Office deposits
• 3 free payments and transfers per month, then 35p each
• Free, unlimited incoming payments
• An overdraft option
• Cash withdrawals at £2 (UK) or £3 (outside the UK)

There are two paid tiers above that:

• Business Extra: £9/month: card cashback, more free payments, in-app messaging and support, and free cash withdrawals
• Business Pro: £19/month: more cashback, more payments and transfers, plus a little extra interest on your savings pots

If transparency and easy-to-find pricing matter to you, Zempler stands out.

So, Are They a Scam?

Clearly not. Every account here is genuinely free to open and run at the basic level. But as you can see, there’s always more to it than “free for everything.”

The real question is how your business operates:

• How do you receive payments?
• How do you send payments?
• Do you handle cash or cheques?
• Do you need multi-currency support?

Answer those, then compare the relevant fees rather than just the monthly headline. Sometimes the genuinely free account is cheapest. Sometimes a paid monthly plan actually works out cheaper once you factor in transaction and cash-handling charges.

In short: free business bank accounts are real, not scams, but the smart move is to read past the headline and match the fine print to how you actually run your business.

Fees and sign-up offers change frequently. Always check the provider’s website for the latest figures before opening an account.

Click here to check out the latest free banking offers

Full transcript:

 Today we are looking at free UK business bank accounts and answering the question, are they a scam or not?

Now I’ll get the the main part out of the way. Free business bank accounts are not a scam.

However, there are some caveats that are really important to look at before you choose your business bank account provider. So we’ll look at some of the deals that are available now and then look into the fine print about some of them. So let’s go see the current best deals.

So we’re starting off here. We’ve got HSBC UK. They’re offering a one hundred pound Amazon gift card when you sign up. They’re claiming no monthly fees, free bank transfers. They offer an overdraft option. They have app, online branch, and post office banking, and they offer you can do cash deposits there.

So if you’re a business that handles cash, they are a potential option. So let’s go over to their website and see what their fees are for their kind of basic account here. So again, monthly account fee, free. So that’s good. Standard domestic digital transactions, so made via business internet banking.

So this is that if you’re doing transactions via internet banking to other UK accounts, it’s free. Debit card payments, free. Now, if you’re going into a branch or a post office, okay, if you’re taking money out, you are charged a one pound fifty fee.

Okay, so there is a charge there. If you are doing cash deposits in branch or post office, you get… You’re charged one point five percent on the value of the deposit, the money deposited or withdrawn. If you deposit checks, it’s fifty P per check, and if you are doing other checks here as well, they have a full price list there.

Okay, so obviously the monthly account free, fee is free, but there are charges for some of these other things. So let’s look at the next kind of offer here. So we’ve got Tide, which is currently offering a two hundred and fifty pound cash back option when you become a customer.

You have to set up two direct debits and spend a minimum of a hundred pounds on your Tide card within thirty days of opening your account. So Tide is one of the kind of neobanks that is very popular in the UK right now and a leader in the business banking space.

They are, One important thing to note is that they’re app and online only but they do offer no hard credit checks, so if you have a bad or no real credit, they can be an option to look at. But again, their basic account is free, but how much do they charge for other things?

Okay, so you’ve got their free account here. And they have a savings account, which just offers up to two percent AER. And then if you pay more, so their £70 a month, you can get that up to up to four percent. They don’t offer the cashback option unless you’re paying the highest sort of fee.

They have payment links. You can see here all sorts of different things here. So you get additional kind of things as you go up in their fee structure. If you’re looking for more advanced features, you have to pay more for them. To get the basics one, basic ones, it is still free.

But again, it’s only five free bank transfers per month, so not a huge number. And then you probably have to start paying for some of the more, their more expensive plans, which start at $12.49 a month if you’re paying monthly okay, so we’re going to go down now to Airwallex which they have a one-month free trial.

And they have an interesting pricing plan here. So it’s either… You either pay £0 a month or £19 a month for the basic account. So it’s zero if you deposit at least 10K per month or hold a minimum balance of 10K in their account, otherwise you’re getting charged 19 a month.

You’re allowed multiple accounts. You can have multiple… You can have accounts for 20 different currencies free transfers interbank ex-exchange rates international batch transfers. So again, it gives you a lot of different options here. So this is really good if you’re… got in… if you’re processing payments internationally.

So you run an online store and you’re getting paid in pounds and euros and dollars, this can be a-an option for you there. But as you can see here, their monthly fees do go up quite steeply from there. So £49 a month for their Grow plan and basically just under £1,000 a month for their Accelerate plan, which offers a bunch of kind of advanced sort of features that you might want.

All right, so continuing on here, we have Starling Bank. So they, again, they’re offering no monthly fee, free bank transfers, no overdraft. But they have their fees buried in this PDF here. It’s not really that easy to find on their website.

If you’re using regular payments, it’s free. But if you’re using CHAPS, it’s £20 per payment, which is very standard. There are conversion fees for foreign exchange. Very standard sort of thing. Maybe you won’t find that in a Airwallex, but you would find it for most other kind of providers.

And if you’re paying in cash, which they do allow with their accounts at the post office, you’re paying 0.7% of the deposit amount for a minimum of £3, whichever is higher. So if you’re depositing a small amount, you b-get charged £3. If you’re depositing more you’ll get charged 0.7% of it, which when you jump back here is actually about half of what HSBC charges.

So if depositing cash is something that’s important to you and it is part of your business, you should definitely look into the fees that these bank accounts will charge. Obviously Tide and Airwallex being online only w-don’t make that particularly easy.

This Starling does make it possible to do that, so you need to just look at that. We’ve got NatWest, which is another kind of high street bank. So they offer a bunch of different accounts. We’re going to look at their main thing, but they also run Mettle, which is another kind of bank account geared more towards sort of small business.

And again, like Starling, they have this huge long PDF here with all the various fees and stuff like that. So it’s a free kind of account. You get two years of free banking from the date the account is opened. They’ll check your turnover.

They’ll start charging you fees as well. So it’s basically for smaller businesses. But once– if you do exceed that hundred thousand pounds a month in a twelve-month period, they’ll let you know and start charging fees immediately. There is payments are thirty-five pounds each in and out.

Cash payments in and out are ninety-five pence per one hundred pounds, which is basically point nine five percent, so higher than Starling, but lower than HSBC. There’s manual payments here. So there’s a whole range of sort of fees.

You have to look it up on their website to see see everything that you could get charged here from them. So they– it’s a free account, but there are some limits here. So the eligibility is basically if you are turning over just a small amount of money, under a hundred thousand pounds a year, you get that, you lose it.

Otherwise, the one advantage with NatWest is that they do have a load of bank branches, which depending on your circumstances could be good for you, and it’s g– can be useful to have somebody to actually talk to about these things as well. And the final kind of free banking account provider we’ll look at here is Zempler Bank.

There’s loads more kind of deals here. I’ll link to it in the description. You can peruse these at your leisure. Obviously, we’re looking to see if these are scams. They’re not scams, but there’s obviously a bit more to it than than totally free for everything.

So Zempler Bank, again, a neobank. They offer their business Go plan, which is zero pounds a month which offers like kind of standard things here, full protection. You can apply online or i-in the app. They’ve got UK telephone support. You can pay into the post offices, which is nice. You can send three free payments and transfers a month and then thirty-five p after that.

You can… Receiving money is totally free and un-unlimited. There is an overdraft option. If you’re taking out cash, it costs you two pounds, or if you’re outside the UK, three pounds. Again, standard things here. Then you have like kind of transaction fees.

One thing I do like about Zempler is that they’ve– these are very transparent, and they can– they show all fees. You’re not getting buried in here things here. You can go down and it li-lists everything here in a really easy to find way, unlike, say, Starling or NatWest, which kind of bury it in the sort of things.

Then there’s their… They have two other plans. So their their next plan up is their Business Extra plan at £9 a month. Get everything else, but you get some cash back on your card spends. You get more free payments every month and in-app kind of messaging and support, kind of everything else here.

Cash withdrawals become free. You can see all this on their website. And then they offer a Business Pro plan at £19 a month. So again, everything you get here, but you’re getting more cash back, you’re getting more payments and transfers every month.

You get a small amount on your s- small amount of extra interest on your savings pots and everything like that, so you have to look into that. But again… And again, all the the things here are listed here. So are free business bank accounts in the UK a scam?

As I’ve shown, the answer is clearly no. But there is always a bit more detail to it. So you really have to understand what…

How you’re going to be processing payments how you’re gonna be receiving payments into your bank account, how you’re gonna be paying things out and all that sort of thing to figure out exactly which is going to be the cheapest option.

Sometimes the free option isn’t gonna actually be the cheapest one. Sometimes a monthly option will actually work out to be cheaper, so something to look at. I’ll link here to to Know Your Business, which offers these kind of… Their current cr- crop of best business bank account deals, and you can you can have a look for yourself. Thanks.