Starling Bank: My top choice for digital banking and fee-free travel money

• Holiday-makers and travellers wanting a debit card to use abroad without any fees. It's particularly good if you want to withdraw from ATMs.
• Those looking for a free digital bank account with excellent customer service and smart features and spending insights.

With Starling, you can ‘kill two birds with one stone' and get a great fee-free digital bank for home and travel abroad. If you're after an account with cashback, perks and subscription-shaped bells and whistles, then Starling might not be for you. It's much more focused on just banking than some of the other challenger banks.

Starling offers the following accounts:

• Personal current account
• Joint account
• Fixed term savings account
• Teen account (16-17 year olds)
• Starling Kite – a debit card for 6-15 year olds linked to an adult account

You can also open a euro or dollar-funded account with Starling, but you'll need to be a current account-holder first. Starling also says it's not accepting applications for its euro or US dollar accounts at the moment, but that they might be available to apply for again soon.

Unlike Monzo and Revolut, there's no choice of free or premium-upgrade accounts with Starling's personal accounts. All accounts are free to hold. That makes it simple to understand what you'll get access to. All the smart budgeting and insight features Starling advertises are available to all customers for no cost. You won't find all the perks and subscriptions that you get as part of the premium accounts with Monzo and Revolut, however. If you just want the banking benefits and you're bothered about the subscriptions and perks, then you can get a better basic package with Starling.

Starling doesn't offer any in-house investing opportunities. There is a savings account (more on that below) but no Starling-branded General investment account (GIA) is an account designed to provide access to investments. You may be liable for tax on any income or capital gains earned within a general investment account but this can be a useful vehicle for anyone who has maxed out their ISA allowancegeneral investment account, Sometimes called an investment ISA, a stocks and shares ISA is an individual savings account that allows you to invest in shares, unit trusts, investment funds, and bonds. You will not need to pay tax on any income or capital gains earned on investments within an ISAstocks and shares ISAe or A cash ISA is a type of individual savings account where you can earn tax-free interest on your saved cashcash ISA. Starling does have something of a workaround for this, however. Through Starling Marketplace, you can pick up an ISA, personal pension, insurance or mortgage via partnerships Starling has built with other providers.

There's links to PensionBee and Penfold if you want a personal pension, and Wealthify for general investing or an ISA. There are no special deals available – you'll pay whatever fees those providers charge. If you want to explore the fees, click the relevant provider name above – I've linked them to our reviews. I'd caution against assuming the fact that Starling allows you link your Starling account to those particular providers as proof that the service or fees will be as good as Starling's. There is plenty of competition in the personal pension and ISA spaces and your particular requirements may not be well served by any of the brands listed. Wealthify doesn't score highly in our review, for example, so it's worth visiting our stocks and shares ISA calculator to get a more personalised recommendation if you're in the market for an ISA.

You can find my top personal pension recommendations here.

One final thought on investing – many of the banks and e-money institutions that also offer investing are offering something that falls far short of what the specialist investment platforms offer. Keeping Starling for your digital banking and travel money, and having a separate provider for your investments, is not a bad option. The likes of Trading 212, AJ Bell, InvestEngine and Moneybox offer easy onboarding, low fees, and far better access to the markets than the trimmed down, gateway options offered by some other digital banks.

Money transfers

Starling offers a speedy money transfer service. It's good on costs, but not quite as good as Wise in my experience. For £1,000 into Euros, I got EUR1184.78 from Starling with their lowest-cost transfer service. To use SWIFT (recommended for paying bills), I could only get EUR1178.60. With Wise, I could get EUR1,185.59.

Interest on cash

Earn 3.25% The annual equivalent rate (AER) is used to describe the percentage of interest you’ll receive on your savings and investments. AER accounts for compound interest whereas the gross interest rate does not. AER is also known as APY (the annual percentage yield). AER* (3.19% gross) variable interest on personal and joint current account balances, up to £5,000 per account. That’s your day-to-day money earning interest, not just savings. For contrast, Monzo doesn't offer that.

Savings account

You can earn 4.48% AER/gross interest with Starling's fixed saver account. While 4.48% is a relatively good rate, you've got to be able to set your money aside for one year to get it, so if you want an instant access savings account instead, you'd have to look elsewhere for that. Having said that, as Starling pays interest on current accounts too, you might not see the point in setting up an instant access savings account anywhere else.

If you want to compare savings account and cash ISA rates, visit my savings account vs cash ISA page.

Starling is a clear 5-stars on fees. The only place it doesn't top the charts is on money transfers where cheaper options are available. (I should also confess I haven't looked at business account fees for this review.)

Free accounts

All personal and joint accounts are free to open and there are no management fees to use them.

There are similarly no fees for using your card abroad, and no fees for withdrawing up to £300 per day from foreign ATMs. Compare that to the limits imposed by Monzo, Revolut and Wise and you'll see how good Starling's fee-free offering is:

Exchange rate

Starling uses the Mastercard exchange rate. While this is generally seen as a mark-up on the interbank rate, our analysis on this shows the differences between those two exchange rates are marginal (unless you're converting very large sums of money). The Mastercard exchange rate is a good rate and can sometimes be lower than the interbank rate due to fact it is set once per day, rather than constantly fluctuating as the interbank rate is.

Fees for depositing cash

You can deposit money up to £1000 each calendar year free of charge using the Post Office Counter Service. For all deposits above this £1000 limit, we will charge you a fee of 0.7% of the amount you deposit.

Fees for sending money transfers

Starling charges a 0.4% currency conversion fee (+ a £5.50 delivery fee if you choose to send via SWIFT). That makes it slightly more pricey option than Wise in my experience.

Fees for receiving transfers in other currencies

You'll be charged a 2% fee to receive money in other currencies. Starling falls behind Wise again here as it's free to receive money into your Wise Account. Some faster methods of sending money, like wire payments in US dollars, have a fixed fee — but there is always be a free alternative with Wise.

Fees for Starling Kite

There is no monthly subscription fee for using Starling Kite. There are no overseas, payments, cash withdrawals or topping up fees either.

Starling performs exceptionally well when it comes to low-cost spending abroad. So well, in fact, that alongside Chase, it's my top pick for a fee-free, travel money account.

One thing to note, Chase allows up to £1,500 to be withdrawn from foreign ATMs over the course of a month. While Starling limits you to £300 per day, there is no monthly limit (over and above whatever £300 x the days of the month is!). If you're planning on withdrawing more than £1,500 within one month when overseas, then Starling is the cheaper option.

Have a question about Starling that we haven't covered? Ask it here and we will get back to you as soon as possible!