Bank of America's flagship savings account currently pays around 0.01% APY, a number that has barely budged even as the Federal Reserve held its benchmark rate in a range that kept many online banks paying above 4% for most of the past two years.
On a $10,000 balance, that's roughly $1 a year in interest.
The same money parked at a competitive online savings account could earn several hundred dollars annually at recent rates.
It's disclosed on the bank's own website.
But it's also the kind of detail that gets buried in the fine print when you're opening a checking account for the branch convenience and the ATM network.
When savings rates were near zero everywhere, it didn't matter where you kept your cash.
The difference between 0.01% and 4% is not a rounding error — it's the difference between your money doing nothing and your money keeping pace with, or at least softening, inflation.
So why do millions of Americans keep their savings at big banks paying next to nothing?
And there's a real psychological pull to keeping everything in one place, even when that convenience has a measurable price tag.
Large institutions make a chunk of their profit on the spread between what they pay depositors and what they earn on loans and securities.
Low deposit rates are not an oversight — they're a business model.
Loyalty, in this context, is expensive for you and lucrative for them.
There's also a trap worth flagging: some of these big banks run promotional savings rates for new customers that quietly expire after a few months, dropping back to the baseline 0.01%.
If you chase a sign-up bonus, read the terms and calendar the expiration date.
If you're not ready to leave your main bank, you don't have to.
Many people keep checking where it is and move only their emergency fund or longer-term savings to a higher-yield account.
That's a one-time setup, not a lifestyle change.
Just watch for transfer limits, minimum balance requirements, and whether the account is FDIC-insured, which it should be.
One caveat on the higher-yield side: those rates are variable and will fall if the Fed cuts.
Some online banks have already trimmed their APYs.
So this isn't a "lock it in forever" move — it's a "stop leaving money on the table right now" move. **The bottom line:** A 0.01% savings rate is a choice the bank made, and staying is a choice you're making.
Neither is illegal, but only one of them costs you money.
Final Thoughts
Check your current APY today — it takes two minutes, and the number might surprise you.