There isn't one best business bank account for a limited company, and most comparisons rank them on the wrong thing. Nearly every provider now offers a free or almost-free account, so the monthly fee separates them by a few pounds. What separates them by hundreds is how your company moves money: whether customers pay you in cash, whether you pay suppliers abroad, and whether you want the bookkeeping inside the account. Bank £10,000 of cash a month, and the gap between the cheapest provider and the dearest is £1,080 a year. Every charge below was checked on 15 October 2026.

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What 'free' means on a business account

Most free business accounts are free while a condition holds. Three conditions do almost all the work: a minimum balance, an introductory period, and a transaction allowance. Here is the headline each provider leads with, and the condition attached to it:

Four of those are free without a catch on the monthly fee: Starling, Zempler's Business Go, Monzo's Lite plan, and HSBC's Small Business Banking Account. The rest ask something of you in return, and two ask a lot.

Allica is the one to look at twice, because it is often recommended to small businesses and it is not built for all of them. You need £50,000 to deposit to open the account, and if your average balance drops under £10,000 in a month, the £25 charge arrives. That's £300 a year on an account chosen because it had no fee.

The Co-operative Bank's 30 months is the longest free period on the high street, and the £1,000 balance condition is easy to miss. It isn't an average balance either: the credit balance has to stay above £1,000 at all times in the charging period, so one tight week undoes the month.

NatWest's two years is worth having and worth reading carefully, because it is the only free offer here that you can lose through trading normally rather than through your balance. If you want the switcher route, it only counts through a completed full switch, so it is worth knowing how switching works before you apply rather than after.

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Paying in cash: what each provider charges

If customers pay you in cash, the deposit charge is almost certainly the largest banking cost your company has, and it is the one comparison tables leave out.

Take a company banking £10,000 of cash a month, which is £120,000 over a year. At the cheapest published route for each provider, that costs:

That is a spread of £1,080 a year between the cheapest and the dearest, widening to £1,680 once HSBC's new price list starts on 14 December 2026. Barclays' own monthly account fee, after the free year, comes to £102 a year. So for this company the charge nobody compares is seven times the charge everybody compares. Where you pay the cash in matters almost as much as which bank you pay it into: Barclays' counter rate is double its self-service rate, and Lloyds' counter rate is nearly double its machine rate.

The digital accounts need a different calculation, because two of them have a ceiling rather than a price.

Starling charges 0.7% of each cash deposit or £3, whichever is higher, and limits a limited company account to £5,000 a day and £100,000 a calendar year. A company taking £120,000 in cash a year cannot use the account for all of it, whatever the charge. Tide takes cash at the Post Office for £2.50 up to £500, then 0.99% on the Free plan and 0.5% on a paid one, and at PayPoint for 3% with a £500 daily cap.

So the honest answer for a cash-heavy company is a high street account, and Barclays is the cheapest of them on published rates. If your cash takings are modest and occasional, the ceilings stop mattering and the free digital accounts come back into play.

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Paying suppliers or staff abroad

Compare the exchange-rate markup, not the transfer fee. The fee is a few pounds and it is advertised; the markup is a percentage of everything you send and it usually isn't.

Tide is the clearest example of how much the plan you are on changes this: its foreign exchange fee is 2.75% on the Free plan and nothing at all on Smart, Pro, and Max. On £10,000 of payments a month, that 2.75% comes to £275, against £12.49 for the Smart plan. A free account can be the expensive one.

Revolut Business is built for this and priced accordingly, with no free plan and Basic starting at £10 a month. It is a full UK bank now: the Prudential Regulation Authority lifted the restrictions on its licence on 11 March 2026 and Revolut Bank UK opened. There is one thing to know before you count on it for borrowing as well. Revolut says plainly that 'at the moment, we don't provide credit, credit cards, or overdrafts', so an account that handles your currency well won't also handle your borrowing.

The high street banks don't publish a single comparable markup, because the rate they apply depends on the currency, the amount, and the channel you use. Ask your bank for the markup in writing on a payment of the size you actually make, and compare that.

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Accounting software: connected or built in

Nearly every business account now connects to Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage, so a connection is no longer a reason to choose one. Allica, for instance, syncs with all three plus FreeAgent. What still differs is whether the software comes with the account or you pay for it separately.

Barclays includes Sage Accounting free for 12 months and then at half price, and discloses that it may receive a fee and revenue share for the introduction. Starling has gone the other way and built the tool itself. Accounting Essentials is free, and Accounting Plus, which keeps VAT records and files returns with HMRC, is £7 a month until April 2027 and £14 a month after that.

Either route beats paying full price for a subscription, so if you were going to buy accounting software anyway, price the account and the software together. It is also worth checking that whatever you choose feeds transactions into your accounting software in a form your accountant will accept, rather than as a monthly export.

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Which providers are banks, and what happens if one fails

Some of the best-known business accounts are not bank accounts, and it changes what happens to your money if the firm goes under. A UK bank is covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which protects eligible deposits up to £120,000 per eligible person, per bank – a limit that rose from £85,000 on 1 December 2025. An e-money firm safeguards your money instead, which means keeping it separate from its own funds, and that is not the same protection.

Three things to check on the account you are considering:

• Tide is not a bank. It is authorised as an e-money firm, and its current accounts are powered by ClearBank, so eligible deposits are protected to £120,000 across all the accounts you hold with ClearBank. Worth knowing if you also bank elsewhere with a ClearBank-backed provider.
• Revolut's cover depends on timing. Revolut Bank UK is a bank and eligible business deposits with it are protected to £120,000, but the move across is phased: accounts opened from 11 March 2026 may still start as e-money and transfer later. Check which one yours is.
• Your company counts as one depositor. Monzo spells this out: eligible deposits in business accounts are treated as made by a single depositor, so the £120,000 is the ceiling for the company, not per director or per account.

If your company holds more than £120,000 for any length of time, the practical answer is to spread it across providers that don't share a banking licence. Our guide to opening a limited company bank account goes through the protection in more detail, along with the documents each provider asks for.

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What your account changes when you apply for finance

Your choice of account changes how much of your company's history a lender can see, and how quickly. That is worth a moment while you're choosing, because it is awkward to fix later.

Many banks only let you download three months of business statements. If you are applying for finance, those three months are quite likely to be your worst three, because the quarter you need money in is usually the quarter that looks thin.

An account that supports an open banking connection lets you share a longer history, drawn from the bank itself. A seasonal dip then reads as a season rather than a decline, and our credit analysts can adjust for a quarter that skews the picture either way. You also upload nothing. We were the first alternative lender to connect to a UK bank using open banking, in October 2018, starting with Lloyds. For what a connection shares and for how long, see our guide to open banking.

One thing we should be open about. Four of the providers on this page – Monzo, Starling, Tide, and Zempler – have a commercial relationship with us, because their customers can apply for a small business loan from inside the account. Two of them don't lend to limited companies themselves: Monzo says it doesn't offer overdrafts to limited companies, and Starling isn't accepting applications for business overdrafts or loans. The relationship hasn't changed what this page says about any of them, and nothing here is ranked. We mention it because you should know who benefits from a recommendation before you act on one.

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Frequently asked questions

Which account is best for a limited company that hasn't started trading yet?

A different set of accounts suits that company, because the question changes from which account fits how you trade to which provider will open one for a company with nothing to show yet. Providers weigh that differently, and some ask for a business plan. Our guide to start-up bank accounts goes through who will say yes.

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Does opening a business bank account show on my credit file?

Sometimes, and it depends on the provider: some run a soft search that only you can see, and others run a hard search that other lenders can. It is worth knowing which before you apply to several at once, and we have set out which banks run which kind of search.

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Can a limited company have more than one business account?

Yes, and for a company that takes cash it can be the cheaper answer: a free digital account for day-to-day payments, and a high street account for paying cash in. Check what a second account does to any introductory offer first. NatWest, for one, extends its free banking to an additional account opened in the first year, running two years from that account's own opening date.