The bank fees you are paying without noticing
Maintenance commissions, card annual fees, transfer charges. Where they hide on the statement, what the law already caps, and what switching is really worth.
By António Avelar Updated 18 August 2026 4 min read
Almost nobody knows what their bank costs them per year. Not because the information is hidden — the price list is public and legally required — but because the charge never arrives as a bill.
It arrives as €5.50 in March, €5.50 in April, €25 once in September, €1.20 on a transfer in between. Each one is too small to react to. Added up, it is often the largest subscription in the account, and the one nobody has ever cancelled.
The four that account for most of it
The maintenance commission. Charged monthly or quarterly for the privilege of the account existing. Usually the biggest single line, and usually waived if you meet conditions you may have stopped meeting years ago.
The card annual fee. Debit and credit cards are billed separately, once a year, often in the month you opened the account rather than in January. A second card on the same account is charged again.
Transfers. Ordinary SEPA transfers are cheap or free through home banking; the same transfer made at a counter costs several euros. Immediate transfers are charged separately from ordinary ones.
Everything bundled as a package. Account packages roll insurance, alerts and card fees into one monthly line. The line is easy to accept and hard to audit — the point of the bundle is that you stop counting the parts.
What the law already caps
Some of what you pay is limited by rules the bank will not remind you about.
Minimum banking services. Any bank must offer an account whose annual maintenance commission cannot exceed 1% of the IAS — a little over €5 a year, against maintenance commissions that routinely run €60 or more. It comes with a debit card, home banking, direct debits and a capped number of interbank transfers. The trade-off is real but narrower than most people assume.
MB WAY transfers. Free up to €30 per transfer, within a monthly ceiling — a limit on the amount sent and on the number of transfers. Past that, the bank may charge, and the commission on immediate transfers is itself capped as a percentage of the amount. Accounts under minimum banking services get a smaller number of free transfers.
Both figures move with the IAS and with amendments to the law, so check the current numbers on the Banco de Portugal’s Portal do Cliente Bancário rather than trusting a figure from an article — including this one.
Where to find what you are actually charged
Two sources, and they answer different questions.
The preçário is what the bank says it charges. Every institution publishes one, and Banco de Portugal runs a commission comparator across all of them on the Portal do Cliente Bancário. Use it to answer “what would this cost elsewhere”.
Your statement is what the bank actually charged you, after whatever exemptions your account carries. Use it to answer “what am I paying now” — and it is the only one of the two that can be wrong in your favour.
The practical method is to take twelve months of statements and pull out every line the bank charged itself: maintenance, annual fees, transfer commissions, stamp duty on each of them. The guide to reading statement lines covers how these appear. If your money is spread across more than one bank, do it per bank — the multi-bank guide explains why the totals only make sense side by side.
Annualise before you decide anything
A fee looks negligible per charge and material per year, which is exactly why banks charge them per month.
€5.50 of maintenance and a €25 card is €91 a year. Two accounts, two cards, and the occasional counter transfer puts a household past €200 without anything unusual happening. That is a fixed cost, and fixed costs are the ones worth attacking — the fixed costs guide makes the case that one afternoon here beats months of watching your grocery spending.
Then ask what the fee is buying. Sometimes the answer is a branch you visit, a manager who answers, or a mortgage priced on the relationship. That is a legitimate reason to pay. Not knowing is not.
The condition nobody rereads
Most exemptions are conditional: salary paid into the account, a minimum monthly card spend, a certain balance, a product held alongside. Change job, change habits, cancel the product, and the exemption quietly lapses. The bank is not required to tell you, and the charge simply reappears.
Worth checking once a year, in the same sitting:
- What did the bank charge me in the last twelve months? One number, all lines.
- Which exemptions am I relying on, and do I still meet them?
- What would the same usage cost at two other banks? The comparator answers this in minutes.
Bank fees are not expensive because the amounts are large. They are expensive because they are recurring, automatic, and invisible — which makes them the easiest money in your budget to get back.