How we collect the data, price each account and score the rankings

1. Account fees: the FCAC Account Comparison Tool

Banks and credit unions submit their chequing and savings account details to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada’s Account Comparison Tool. On November 1, 2026 we ran its search for Canadian-dollar chequing and savings accounts in every province and territory, plus its student, newcomer, senior and youth filters in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec, and saved each account’s full detail page. That gave 330 accounts (203 chequing, 127 savings) from 59 institutions. The raw capture is kept in the site’s repository (research/fcac-accounts-20261101.json) and parsed by a script, so no fee is retyped by hand.

For each account we keep: monthly fee and any minimum balance that waives it, included transactions (one pool, or branch and self-serve pools), per-transaction fees once those run out (debit, bill payment, e-Transfer, transfer, ATM, branch, cheque), other-bank and foreign ATM fees, paper statement, NSF and overdraft fees, posted interest tiers, notes, the product page link, and the provinces where FCAC lists it.

Institutions FCAC doesn’t list

National Bank, one of the Big Six, isn’t in FCAC’s tool. Its three chequing packages (The Minimalist, The Connected and The Total) are entered from its own Fee Guide (effective February 15, 2026), and each of those account pages names that source. Where the guide doesn’t state a single fee (extra electronic transactions on The Minimalist), we leave it unpriced and say so.

Accuracy spot-check

On November 1, 2026 we compared FCAC’s figures with the banks’ own chequing pages for 15 flagship accounts at TD (Minimum, Every Day, Unlimited, All-Inclusive, Student), RBC (Day to Day, Advantage, Signature No Limit, VIP), CIBC (Everyday, Smart) and Scotiabank (Basic, Basic Plus, Preferred, Ultimate). Every monthly fee, balance waiver and transaction allowance matched. A second pass through each bank’s full fee schedule found details FCAC’s data gets wrong or leaves out — TD’s other-bank ATM fee is $2.00 (FCAC lists $3.25), Scotiabank, BMO and CIBC count e-Transfers toward the allowance, CIBC Smart rebates one other-bank ATM withdrawal a month, and National Bank charges $1.25 per transaction beyond The Minimalist’s 18 — and those are now applied as corrections, each shown on its account page. The banks’ pages add details FCAC doesn’t carry — seniors’ rebates, bundle and mortgage waivers, and CIBC’s announced Smart Account fee of $17.95 from January 1, 2027 — which the yearly cost leaves out. BMO’s figures come from its official fee PDF (its web pages couldn’t be read automatically); EQ Bank’s and posted savings rates generally are shown as listed with FCAC and not independently confirmed.

Where the institution’s own page disagrees with FCAC, we show FCAC’s figure (it is the dataset every account is compared on) and flag the difference on that account’s page. Promotional rates and bundle rebates are not in FCAC’s data.

Corrections and group prices from the banks’ own fee schedules

FCAC’s data doesn’t carry everything that changes what an account costs. For the Big Six, Tangerine and Simplii we read each bank’s own fee schedule or disclosure booklet (TD and BMO fee guides, RBC’s disclosures booklet, Scotiabank’s companion booklet, CIBC’s service-fee schedule, National Bank’s Fee Guide) on November 1, 2026 and recorded, with the source on each account page:

• Which transactions count toward the allowance — for example, Scotiabank, BMO and CIBC count Interac e-Transfers toward the limit; RBC’s Day to Day plan doesn’t.
• Other-bank ATM fees and rebates — for example, TD’s $2.00 (FCAC lists $3.25), CIBC Smart’s one rebated withdrawal a month.
• Seniors’, students’ and newcomers’ prices — used when you pick that group in the finder and in the seniors, students and newcomers rankings.
• Missing per-transaction fees — for example, National Bank’s $1.25 per electronic transaction beyond The Minimalist’s 18.

Cost incomplete: if your usage would trigger a fee the institution doesn’t state anywhere we can find, the account shows a minimum cost marked “incomplete” and is never ranked or used in a headline.

2. The true-cost engine

Given your monthly usage, the engine works out each account’s fees for a year:

1. Monthly fee: the listed fee (the higher figure when FCAC lists a range), or $0 if your lowest balance in the month is at or above the waiver balance.
2. Included transactions: debit purchases, bill payments, e-Transfers, transfers, own-bank and other-bank ATM withdrawals, branch transactions and cheques count against the included number. Accounts with separate branch and self-serve allowances use two pools. A kind the account lists with no extra fee beyond the allowance (often e-Transfers and transfers between your own accounts) doesn’t use the allowance up, matching how banks describe “12 debits plus unlimited e-Transfers”.
3. Extra transactions: the number over the limit is shared across the kinds you use in proportion to use, and each share is priced at that kind’s listed fee.
4. Other-bank ATM access fee charged by your own bank, on every such withdrawal; paper statement if you want one.

Fees a year = 12 × (monthly fee + extra-transaction fees + other-ATM fees + paper statement). Interest is estimated on your typical balance at the rate for the tier that balance falls in, and shown separately (or subtracted, if you choose). If FCAC lists a service you use as “Not available”, the account is marked as unable to serve your usage and sorted to the end. An account counts as having in-branch service only when FCAC lists both in-branch withdrawals and in-branch bill payments as available.

Not included: ATM owners’ surcharges, foreign exchange, NSF and overdraft charges, rebates for bundles, credit cards or age, welcome bonuses and promotional rates.

Example usage profiles

These are illustrations, not statistics about Canadians. Use your own numbers in the finder.

3. How the rankings are scored

Each ranking is a fixed view of the dataset. For each usage profile an account (or institution) gets a cost score of 100 − (fees a year ÷ $3), floored at 0: $0 a year scores 100, $150 scores 50, $300 or more scores 0. A profile it can’t serve scores 0. The overall score is the weighted average. For institutions, each profile uses the institution’s cheapest account that can serve it. Ties break on lower total fees, then alphabetically. Accounts or institutions that can’t serve a ranking’s main profile (the one with the largest weight) are left out of that ranking.

Accounts limited to a group (students, youth, seniors, newcomers, low-cost eligibility) are identified from the product name and only appear in that group’s ranking or when you tick “include” in the finder. OBSI complaint counts (fiscal 2025 (Nov 1, 2024 – Oct 31, 2025)) are shown on the institution ranking and profiles for context, but they aren’t scored because OBSI doesn’t publish them per customer.

The best-banks review

The best banks review scores 20 institutions on five published components: cost (35%), branch and ATM access (15%), best posted savings rate (15%), App Store rating (15%) and OBSI banking cases per million clients (20%). App ratings were read from Apple’s App Store (Canada) and Google Play on November 1, 2026; branch and client counts come from annual reports and official pages, used only where the institution states a comparable Canadian figure. A component without data is left out and the remaining weights scaled up; the evidence table on that page shows every input and its source.

The rate tracker

The rate tracker charts the Bank of Canada’s weekly series of typical posted rates at the six largest banks (1-, 3- and 5-year GICs and non-chequable savings) since 2016, with the policy rate, and lists posted rates from institutions’ own pages as dated snapshots.

4. The official lists and profiles

OSFI’s file doesn’t use the words “Schedule I/II/III”; we map domestic banks to Schedule I, foreign bank subsidiaries to Schedule II and foreign bank branches to Schedule III, following the Bank Act. CDIC membership is matched by exact legal name. Profile facts come from annual information forms, official releases, the institution’s own pages, OSFI, CDIC, provincial regulators and the Canada Gazette; each links to its source.

5. Rules, tools and dates

Regulatory facts (CDIC categories, the low-cost account commitment, NSF caps, cheque holds and holidays, complaint timelines, open banking status) come from the agency or statute responsible. Plans and forecasts are labelled. Where we couldn’t read an official page directly — FSRA (Ontario) and the AMF (Quebec) blocked automated checks — we say so on the page. Calculators run in your browser from tested modules, and each page’s worked example is produced by the same code.

6. What changed from the earlier site

The site’s original 2025 rankings used scores with no published method, so they were removed in October 2026. The rankings published since November 1, 2026 are computed from FCAC fee data with the method above. The old ranking addresses — students, newcomers and online banks — now carry these data rankings; business stays a guide because FCAC’s tool covers personal accounts only.

7. Corrections and refresh

We re-run the FCAC capture and re-check official lists at least quarterly and whenever a regulator announces a change, and update the dates when we do. Pending events — such as Laurentian Bank’s sale, scheduled for November 1, 2026 — are flagged until confirmed. Spot a number that looks wrong? Tell us through any enquiry form and we’ll check it against the source.

Mitey’s note

If a number on this site doesn’t have a source next to it, it’s either computed by a tool (and labelled) or it’s a mistake we want to fix.