Four of us in Leeds, reading tariffs so you do not have to.
I went looking for a straight answer about business accounts two years ago and could not find one. Every comparison ranked banks on a feeling, and the ones that looked most confident turned out to be paid per click.
Then I read the survey. Providers of business current accounts are required to publish how their own customers rate them, and Ipsos runs it for the regulator twice a year. The document says plainly that it is “not giving you any advice or making any recommendation to you”. That is the honest part. It also means nobody had turned it into anything you could use.
So we did.
Five rules we do not bend.
Nobody pays to appear on this site and no link here earns us anything. The annual report and the switching read are what we sell, and they are sold to readers rather than to providers.
Tariffs move without notice. A number without a date is a number you cannot check, so each one links the document and states the day it was read.
Where we could not verify something we print that instead of estimating. Four providers sit in the cash calculator rather than seventeen, and the reason is written next to it.
Every provider named here is real, every rate is published, and there are no rows labelled Provider A. If a comparison needs a company we cannot name, the comparison does not run.
Two businesses with identical turnover can correctly choose opposite accounts. Every tool here takes your figures rather than an average, and the answer changes when your pattern does.
How the numbers get here.
The scores are not ours. Ipsos runs the survey for the Competition and Markets Authority twice a year, and every large provider of business current accounts has to publish the result. This round covered 20,400 customers between July 2025 and June 2026, roughly 1,200 for each provider.
The results arrive as a PDF of bar charts. My first attempt was to pull the text straight out of it, which produced a tidy column of percentages and not one bank name, because the names are logos. I had built a table and labelled it wrong before I noticed. So I read all of it and typed the figures in by hand instead, which took most of an afternoon.
A measure is published only “where at least 100 customers have provided an eligible score for that service”. That is why five names carry nothing under branches: they are excluded “as do not operate a branch network”.
The holes, named.
Four providers sit in the cash tools, not seventeen. We have not been able to get a current published cash tariff for HSBC, Lloyds or NatWest that we would put our name to, and we are not going to estimate one.
The Tide figures come from its own support pages, which carry a 2024 date, so they may have moved since.
Nobody publishes how long a frozen business account stays frozen. We have looked and asked. The data does not exist in public, which is itself worth knowing before you assume the process has a deadline.
If you hold a recent statement or price list from any provider we are missing, send it. We will read it, cite it, and put the provider in with the date on it.
Two things we sell, and one we do for free.
We do not give financial advice and we are not regulated to. For a decision that carries real consequence, speak to somebody qualified who knows your circumstances.