Account maintenance fees, cards, withdrawals… banking fees will increase in 2025, are you one of the customers affected ?

Your bank will never have cost you so much: this is the result of the annual study by the consumer association CLCV, which notes increases in bank charges that could exceed 5% this year.

“Account maintenance fees, bank cards, ATM withdrawals are the items on which we have seen the most increases in the various banking networks”, write the authors of the study.

Account maintenance fees, an essential basis of banking services, are for example significantly increasing, by around 8%.

In detail, the “small consumers”, with a basic set of services, will now pay 69.78 euros per year (+5.46%) and so-called average consumers (a couple with two cards with loss and theft insurance) will pay 134.94 euros (+5.29%).

The “heavy consumers” in the sense of CLCV, i.e. two “high-end” cardholders with a Gold or Premier card and making many withdrawals, are more protected with an increase of 3.88%, to 214.87 euros. These averages hide disparities.

The retail banking market “remains, in fact, marked by significant price differences between brands, types of banking relationships, and also regions”, stressed the specialist site Moneyvox at the end of last year, which had also undertaken the price comparison exercise.

“An interesting alternative for consumers”

The CLCV has examined the price lists in effect on February 1, 2025 within around a hundred establishments, national networks and regional banks.

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According to it, Crédit Coopératif is competitive on all market segments while LCL is for small consumers and BNP Paribas for average consumers.

SG, the merger of the retail banking networks of Société Générale and Crédit du Nord, is among the most expensive banks across all profiles, as are, to a lesser extent, Banques Populaires.

The French Banking Federation (FBF), in a reaction sent to AFP, pointed out the methodological changes in the CLCV study which, according to it, “make the analysis difficult to comment on”.

The CLCV association also draws consumers' attention to the bundled service offers, or packages, subscribed to by the majority of banking customers: these formulas “are not always advantageous compared to subscribing to the unit of identical products”, it observes.

The only bright spot this year is the new free instant transfers, which allow beneficiaries to receive the transferred money in less than 10 seconds.

Due to European regulations, banks are in fact required to align the prices of instant transfers with those of classic transfers, which are generally free and whose reception times are measured in days.

Online banks “can constitute a [option] interesting alternative for consumers who are fans of long-distance relationships”, the consumer association also believes, “their offers are indeed competitive, provided you are vigilant about any conditions of use”.

A “questionable” practice

The average amounts calculated by CLCV do not include any bank incident fees. Intervention fees, direct debit, transfer or check rejections can cost up to 50 euros, with banks almost systematically aligning themselves with the maximum authorized amount…

For negligent customers or those in financial difficulty, the fees can amount to hundreds of euros per year. According to the comparator Panorabanques, bank incident fees represent on average a third of total bank charges.

The CLCV also denounces the fact that a minimum flat rate is applied to the customer in the event of an overdraft, as soon as it occurs and however small it may be, a practice “completely questionable (…) even if it is legal”.

In total, the bill for financial services for a household is soaring this year, well beyond inflation. In addition to bank charges, there is the increase in car insurance rates, which is expected to be 4 to 6% in 2025, and that of multi-risk home insurance, from 8% to 12%, according to estimates from two specialist firms.