Bank of America customers are earning 0.01% on their standard savings accounts.
One-hundredth of one percent, the same rate the bank has offered for years while the Federal Reserve held its benchmark rate far higher.
On a $10,000 balance, that works out to about $1 per year in interest.
Meanwhile, a competitive online savings account paying roughly 4% would generate around $400 on the same money.
The gap isn't a rounding error — it's a car payment, a month of groceries, or a chunk of an emergency fund.
This isn't a Bank of America-specific scandal.
Most big brick-and-mortar banks — Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank — pay similarly stingy rates on basic savings.
The difference is that Bank of America is the second-largest US bank by deposits, with tens of millions of consumer accounts, so the math scales into billions of dollars in foregone interest for households.
Here's the part that rarely gets mentioned: the bank isn't hiding the rate.
But the structure of the relationship nudges customers toward staying anyway.
Switching means opening a new account, moving direct deposits, updating autopay links, and trusting a bank you've never walked into.
That friction is worth real money to Bank of America, and it's a big reason the low rate persists.
The pitch for keeping money at a big bank usually comes down to convenience — branches, ATMs, a familiar app, a relationship that goes back years.
But the question worth asking is whether they're worth $399 a year on a $10,000 balance.
For most households, that's not a close call.
There's also a catch buried in the fine print.
Bank of America's higher-yield options, like its Preferred Rewards program, tier rates based on how much you hold across the bank.
You typically need meaningful balances to unlock anything better than the standard rate.
So the customers with the least money to spare are the ones earning the least on it.
This is the quiet business model of big-bank deposits: pay almost nothing, rely on inertia, and let the spread between what you earn and what the bank earns on your money do the work.
Banks invest deposits and earn far more than 0.01%.
None of this means you should panic-move your money tonight.
It means you should look at what your savings account actually pays, in dollars, over a year.
If the number embarrasses you, that's information.
Online banks and some credit unions have been paying multiples of that rate, and moving an emergency fund is usually a 15-minute task, not a weekend project.
The honest takeaway is that loyalty to a big bank's savings account is expensive, and the bank is counting on you not to notice.
Check your rate, run the math on your own balance, and decide whether convenience is really worth what you're paying for it.
Final Thoughts
The answer might surprise you — in either direction.