Two hundred pounds lands in your account roughly a week after you fill in a switching form — no interview, no credit check beyond what your new bank already runs, no catch that isn't written down somewhere in the terms. That's the pitch behind current account switching bonuses, and in 2026 it's still one of the more reliable pieces of "free money" available to anyone with a UK bank account and a bit of patience. First Direct, Nationwide and NatWest have all run cash incentives worth £150–£200 over the past year to pull customers away from rivals, and the mechanism that makes it painless — the Current Account Switch Service, or CASS — has been quietly working since 2013 with a completion guarantee that most switchers never bother reading.
What CASS actually promises
CASS moves your current account from one participating bank to another in seven working days, full stop. Standing orders, direct debits, incoming salary payments and any payments already in transit get redirected automatically, and any payment sent to your old account by mistake is forwarded on and the payer notified for a full 36 months after the switch date. If something goes wrong — a direct debit bounces, a payment gets lost — the losing or gaining bank has to put things right and cover any resulting fees or interest, no argument. That guarantee is backed by Pay.UK and covers the vast majority of UK current account providers, from the big four through to Nationwide, First Direct, TSB and most of the challenger banks.
What CASS does not do is touch your account number and sort code history in any way that affects your credit file, and it doesn't require you to close anything manually — the old account gets shut down as part of the process once everything has migrated across. You keep the same account number and sort code from your new provider, obviously, which is the one genuine inconvenience: anyone who pays you by bank transfer needs telling, even though CASS forwards misdirected payments for three years as a safety net.
Why banks are willing to pay you to leave someone else
A switching bonus looks generous until you work out the economics from the bank's side, and then it looks like exactly what it is: customer acquisition cost. A current account holder who also takes out a mortgage, a savings product or a credit card over the following few years is worth vastly more to a bank than £200, and the switching bonus is a cheap way to get a foot in the door compared with branch advertising or broker commissions. Nationwide has leaned on this for years through its member-loyalty model — a switch bonus plus an annual "fairer share" payout tied to membership — while First Direct has built its entire acquisition strategy around word-of-mouth and a headline switching offer, on the logic that its award-winning telephone service does the retention work once the customer is in.
NatWest and other high-street incumbents use switching offers more defensively, responding to attrition rather than leading with it, which is why the amount and availability of these deals shifts every few months rather than sitting at a fixed number. Chase UK, Monzo and Starling have mostly stayed out of the cash-bonus game entirely — their acquisition cost sits in marketing and app-store reviews rather than direct payments, and their pitch is a better everyday product rather than a one-off sum.
The strings attached
Nobody hands over £150–£200 for opening an account and doing nothing with it. Typical conditions across the banks currently running offers include:
- Depositing a minimum amount, commonly £1,000–£2,000, within a set window after the switch completes
- Moving at least two active direct debits across as part of the CASS process
- Logging in to the mobile banking app and, in some cases, making a set number of debit card payments
- Keeping the account open and in active use for a minimum period, often 60 to 90 days, before the payment is released — and some providers will claw the bonus back if you switch away again within twelve months
Read the specific terms before you switch, because banks change the qualifying criteria more often than they change the headline amount, and a bonus advertised as "up to £200" sometimes pays out in tiers depending on how much you deposit.
What the bonus doesn't tell you about the account itself
Here's the part switchers skip past too quickly: a £200 bonus is a one-off, but the account you're moving into is where your money sits for years. An account paying 1% credit interest on balances, charging £5 a day for an unarranged overdraft, or bundling in a monthly fee will cost you the bonus back within twelve to eighteen months if your balances or spending don't suit its structure. Halifax's Reward Current Account has run a monthly cash reward alongside its switching offers precisely because the ongoing payment matters more over time than the entry bonus — worth comparing against a straight switching cash figure before deciding which one actually leaves you better off a year from now.
Take the bonus if you were switching anyway for better everyday banking — a lower overdraft rate, a proper savings pot, an app you'll actually use daily. Don't switch purely to chase £200 if it means moving into an account with worse overdraft terms or a monthly fee that eats the bonus within a year; that trade only makes sense on paper.
Checking eligibility before you commit
Most switching offers exclude anyone who has held an account with that bank, or sometimes any account under the same banking group, within the past 12 to 36 months — Nationwide, for instance, has historically excluded former members from its cash incentives, and NatWest has done the same for anyone who's held a NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland or Ulster Bank account recently, since all three sit under the same group. Always check the small print on your specific circumstances rather than assuming eligibility from a headline advert, because the rejection usually only surfaces after you've already gone through the switch.
It's also worth checking whether the offer is genuinely open to new applicants or restricted to those who apply through a comparison site, since several banks have run comparison-site-exclusive versions of a switching bonus that pay more than the version advertised directly on their own site. Comparison platforms such as MoneySavingExpert and Compare the Market track live switching offers and their eligibility rules in more detail than most bank marketing pages bother to spell out.
The FCA and PSR angle
The Financial Conduct Authority doesn't regulate the size of switching bonuses directly, but it does require any promotional financial incentive to be clear, fair and not misleading under its consumer duty rules — which is why the qualifying conditions have to sit somewhere accessible, even when they're buried in a PDF nobody reads. The Payment Systems Regulator, meanwhile, oversees CASS itself as critical payments infrastructure, and its most recent data continues to show completion rates for switches well above 99%, with the seven-day guarantee met in the overwhelming majority of cases. Failed or delayed switches do still happen — usually where a customer has an unusual mix of standing orders tied to third-party systems that don't refresh cleanly — but they're the exception rather than a real risk worth building a decision around.
So is a switching bonus actually worth the admin? For most people with a fairly standard financial life — a salary paid in, a handful of direct debits, no complicated joint arrangements — the answer is yes, provided the destination account doesn't quietly cost more than the bonus is worth. The seven-day guarantee removes almost all of the practical risk that used to make people put off switching banks for years at a time, and £150–£200 for roughly twenty minutes of form-filling is a better hourly rate than most people get from anything else in their financial life this month.