Citizens Bank allows up to five overdraft charges per day at $35 each, a $175 daily maximum that dwarfs the limits set by Wells Fargo, Chase, and other large banks.
Most banks cap overdraft fees at three per day, The Sun reported, citing data from NerdWallet. Citizens Bank permits five. That means a customer who overdraws on five separate transactions in a single day faces $175 in fees, before the underlying purchases are even counted.
The fee itself, $35 per item, is standard across much of the industry. What sets Citizens Bank apart is how many times it will charge that fee in a 24-hour window. After the fifth overdraft in a day, the bank stops adding fees; the sixth overdrawn purchase goes through without an additional charge. But by that point, the customer already owes nearly $200 in penalties alone.
The gap between Citizens Bank and its competitors is not small. Wells Fargo customers face a daily overdraft maximum of $105, three charges of $35 each. Chase caps its daily overdraft fees at $102. Fifth Third matches Wells Fargo at $105.
Citizens Bank's $175 ceiling sits $70 above Wells Fargo and Fifth Third, and $73 above Chase. For a customer living paycheck to paycheck, that difference is not abstract, it can mean the gap between recovering from a rough week and falling into a deeper hole.
Two major banks have moved even further from the old model. Truist and PNC do not charge overdraft fees on purchases at all. That puts Citizens Bank not just above the industry average but near the top of what any large bank will extract from a single customer in a single day.
Truist's decision to drop overdraft fees came after the bank and its predecessor, SunTrust, faced legal scrutiny, a $240 million settlement over overdraft practices that offered affected customers up to $1,000 each. The litigation underscored how aggressively some banks had structured their fee systems, and how much money those systems pulled from customers who could least afford it.
An overdraft occurs when a customer spends more than the available balance in an account and the bank covers the transaction anyway. The bank then charges a fee for each covered item. In theory, the service keeps a debit card from being declined at the register. In practice, the fees can pile up faster than many customers realize.
At Citizens Bank, a customer who buys coffee, gas, lunch, a prescription, and groceries on a day when the account is empty would owe $175 in fees on top of whatever those five purchases cost. The total could easily exceed $200 in a single day, all triggered by spending that may amount to less than $100 in actual goods.
That math hits hardest for the people banks describe as their everyday customers. Overdraft fees do not fall evenly across the customer base. They concentrate among account holders who carry the lowest balances and have the fewest alternatives, the same people who are most likely to be caught off guard by debit card authorization holds and other charges that temporarily reduce available funds.
Citizens Bank has not offered a public statement explaining why it permits five overdraft charges per day when most competitors stop at three. No implementation date for the current policy structure has been disclosed. It is unclear whether the five-per-day cap applies uniformly across all account types and all transaction methods, debit purchases, ACH transfers, checks, or whether certain categories are treated differently.
The bank industry as a whole has faced growing pressure on overdraft practices. Several major banks have explored ways to restructure fee arrangements as regulators and lawmakers scrutinize what consumers actually pay. Some institutions have responded by cutting fees or eliminating them. Others, like Citizens Bank, have kept the per-item charge at the industry-standard $35 but maintained a higher ceiling on how many times it can be levied in a day.
The result is a fee structure that looks ordinary on its face, $35 is $35, but operates more aggressively in practice than what most large banks impose. A customer at Citizens Bank can rack up nearly 70 percent more in daily overdraft fees than a customer at Chase or Wells Fargo, simply because the bank lets the meter run longer.
When banks talk about serving working families, the fine print matters more than the marketing. A $175 daily overdraft ceiling tells you exactly who is paying for the service, and it is not the customers with money to spare.