What your everyday account costs you, at home and overseas.

Because the monthly fee rarely decides it. Most banks waive theirs once $1,000 to $2,000 goes in a month, or for younger or older customers, so at home most everyday accounts cost nothing. What separates them is overseas: a few charge no fee on a purchase in another currency and most charge 3% or more, which is $120 a year on $4,000 of travel or online shopping. We price every account on your own pay, age and overseas spending, so the cost is yours, not the sticker.

Usually, yes. Banks charge their international fee on any purchase in another currency, and many also charge it when the shop is based overseas but charges you in Australian dollars. Shopping from home with an overseas retailer can cost the same fee as buying on holiday.

Not always. When a bank says it charges no overseas ATM fee, it means the bank adds no fee of its own. The ATM’s owner can still charge one, and many overseas ATMs do, usually shown on screen before you confirm. Banks don’t publish those fees, so the costs here count only the bank’s own fees.

Wise and providers like it aren’t banks, building societies or credit unions. They hold your money as a payment service, kept apart from their own, but it isn’t a deposit, so the government’s Financial Claims Scheme, which covers deposits up to $250,000 per person per institution, doesn’t cover it. They can be cheap overseas. You can choose to see banks only.

Banks publish their accounts and fees through Open Banking (the Consumer Data Right), and we read them from every bank that files one. Where a bank’s data leaves a fee out or contradicts its own words, we read the bank’s own page and use that, keeping the bank’s filed figure beside it so we see when it catches up. Non-banks aren’t on Open Banking, so their figures come from their own pages.