Bank of America pays a fraction of what online banks offer on savings, and most customers never notice.
The nation's second-largest bank currently pays around 0.01% APY on its standard savings account, according to its published rate sheet.
On $10,000, you would earn about one dollar over a full year.
Meanwhile, a long list of online banks and money market funds have spent the past two years paying in the 4% to 5% range.
On that same $10,000, that is roughly $400 to $500 a year.
It is a car payment, a month of groceries, or a chunk of an emergency fund that simply never shows up.
Big banks do not need your savings dollars badly enough to pay for them.
They sit on enormous deposit bases, and their customers tend to stay put out of habit, branch loyalty, or plain inertia.
JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America have all reported paying depositors far less than what they earn parking money at the Federal Reserve.
That spread is a profit center, and it is legal, disclosed, and easy to miss.
Switching savings accounts takes maybe fifteen minutes online, but banks are betting you will not bother.
A 2023 Bankrate survey found a majority of Americans earn less than 4% on their savings, even after the Fed's rate hikes pushed many accounts well past that mark.
The people losing the most are often those with the smallest cushions, who can least afford to leave free money on the table.
Seeing "0.01%" in the fine print does not feel like a loss the way a fee does.
Your balance just grows slower than inflation, which means your purchasing power shrinks in real terms while the account looks perfectly healthy.
To be fair, Bank of America's savings rates are not the whole story.
The bank offers tiered rates through its Preferred Rewards program, so customers with larger combined balances can earn meaningfully more.
It also bundles checking, credit cards, and investing perks that some customers genuinely value.
If you keep $100,000 parked there to hit a higher tier, the math may work in your favor.
If you want to check your own situation, look up your current APY in the account disclosures, not the marketing page.
Then compare it against a few FDIC-insured online savings accounts and money market funds.
Moving money between banks is not complicated: open the new account, link it, and transfer.
Your Bank of America checking account can stay exactly where it is.
The Fed has been signaling cuts, so the 5% era may be fading.
Locking in a high rate today is not a permanent win, and chasing the single highest yield every month can become its own part-time job.
A reasonable middle ground is a solid, consistently competitive account you will actually maintain.
Every bank sets a default rate for customers who never ask questions, and those defaults are engineered to be profitable.
If you have never checked what your savings pays, you are almost certainly on the wrong side of that arrangement.
Our take: this is less a scandal than a business model working exactly as designed.
Banks are not hiding the rate, they are counting on you not to look.
Final Thoughts
Fifteen minutes of comparison shopping is the rare personal finance move with a near-guaranteed payoff, and the only real risk is doing nothing.