What a bank fee waiver really costs you
The big banks will waive your monthly chequing fee if you keep a minimum balance parked in the account. It sounds like free banking. Here is the math they never put on the page.
There is a sentence buried in almost every big-bank chequing account in Canada, and it is designed to make you feel clever. It reads something like this: the monthly fee is waived when you keep a minimum balance in your account. You do the quick sum in your head, decide you can leave a few thousand dollars sitting there, and walk away feeling like you beat the system. Free banking, no fee, done.
You did not beat the system. You just agreed to lend the bank a large sum of money, indefinitely, at zero percent interest, and to call that a win. Once you see the waiver for what it actually is, you cannot unsee it.
A fee waiver is not free money. It is a four-thousand-dollar loan to your bank at zero percent interest.
How the waiver actually works
The setup is nearly identical across the big five. You open a mid-tier chequing account, it carries a monthly fee somewhere around seventeen dollars, and the bank offers to rebate that fee in full if your balance stays at or above a set threshold. At the time of writing, the common numbers look like this, though you should confirm the current figures directly with the bank before you rely on them:
TD Unlimited Chequing. A monthly fee of $16.95, waived when you keep a minimum balance of $4,000. BMO Performance. A monthly fee of $17.95, waived at a $4,000 minimum balance. Scotiabank Preferred Package. A monthly fee of $16.95, waived at $4,000. The pattern repeats, account after account, bank after bank. Park four thousand dollars, and roughly two hundred dollars a year in fees disappears.
On its face, that is a good trade. Two hundred dollars saved for money you were going to keep in the bank anyway. But the trade is only good if that four thousand dollars had no better place to be. And in 2026, it almost certainly does.
The number the bank leaves off the page
Money is not free to hold still. Every dollar you keep in a chequing account earning nothing is a dollar that is not earning something somewhere else. Economists call that the opportunity cost. Your bank calls it a minimum balance and hopes you never do the second calculation.
So let us do it. A no-fee high-interest savings account in Canada pays somewhere in the range of two to three percent right now. EQ Bank, as one public example, has been paying around 2.75 percent on its everyday balance. Four thousand dollars sitting in an account like that earns roughly $110 in a year. Four thousand dollars sitting in a chequing account to dodge a fee earns you exactly nothing.
Now compare both of those to the option the bank would rather you forget entirely: an account that has no monthly fee and no minimum balance at all. There, your four thousand dollars is free to sit in savings earning its $110, and you pay nothing to bank. No fee to waive, no balance to trap, no annual $203 to route around. The waiver was never the best deal on the table. It was just the most flattering one.
The trap inside the trap
Here is the part that turns a mediocre deal into a bad one. The waiver is not forgiving. On most of these accounts the minimum balance has to hold for the entire statement period, and on some it has to hold at the end of every single day. Dip below the threshold once, for one day, and the fee comes back for that whole month.
Think about how easily that happens. Rent clears, a car repair lands, you move money to cover a credit card, and for two days your balance sits at $3,850. You were never told the exact day the bank checks, and you were not watching. At the end of the month the $16.95 appears anyway. You locked up four thousand dollars, earned nothing on it, and still paid the fee you were trying to avoid.
The minimum balance only works in your favour on the months you did not need the money. On the months you did, it fails exactly when it would have helped.
This is the quiet cruelty of the design. The people most likely to breach the minimum are the people living closest to it, the ones for whom two hundred dollars a year actually matters. The buffer protects you only when you did not need protecting.
When the waiver does make sense
None of this makes the waiver a scam. For some people it is genuinely the right call, and it is worth being honest about who they are.
If you comfortably keep well above the threshold at all times, so far above it that dipping below is not a realistic risk, then the fee is effectively gone and the only cost is the forgone interest on the specific dollars pinned in place. If you value having one account that does everything, unlimited transactions and included extras, and you would rather not manage a second savings account at another bank, the simplicity has a value that is fair to weigh. And if the bundled account throws in perks you would otherwise pay for, a safety deposit box, waived fees on a premium credit card, free drafts, the waiver can pull its weight.
The rule worth remembering
Whenever a bank offers to waive a fee in exchange for a balance, translate it out of their language and into yours. They are not giving you free banking. They are asking to hold your money for free, and paying you back in the currency of a fee you would not owe at a different bank at all.
Sometimes that is a fine trade. Often it is not. The only way to know is to run the second calculation, the one about what your money could be doing instead, because that is the number the marketing page will never show you. If you want to see what genuinely fee-free banking looks like in Canada, with no balance to babysit, our guide to what "no-fee" banking really means walks through the four questions that separate free from "free."