Tide vs Starling: which business account should you open?

If you have narrowed a UK business account search down to two names, there is a good chance they are these two. Tide and Starling both built app-first business accounts for sole traders, freelancers and small limited companies; both open in days rather than weeks; both are used by hundreds of thousands of UK businesses. The marketing makes them sound interchangeable. They are not.

The honest summary is this: Starling is the better account if you handle cash regularly or expect to borrow from your bank, and Tide is the better account if you are paid electronically and want invoicing, expense tagging and savings inside the same app for £0 a month. Most of the businesses we hear from fall into the second group, which is why Tide is our recommendation on this page — and why we should say clearly that we earn a commission from Tide links and nothing from Starling.

At a glance

What each one actually costs

Comparing "free" accounts is where most write-ups go wrong. Both providers advertise a free tier, and both charge for something. The question is which charges land on your business.

Tide's Free plan carries no monthly fee at all. It includes five bank transfers a month and charges 20p per transfer after that. Card payments in sterling are free, Tide-to-Tide payments are free, and there is no charge for holding the account. The Free plan's two real costs are the 20p transfer overage and a 2.75% fee on foreign-currency card transactions. Paid plans buy allowances rather than privileges: Smart at £12.49 a month includes 30 transfers and waives FX fees, Pro at £27.49 makes transfers unlimited, and Max at £69.99 adds 0.5% cashback on card spend.

Starling's standard business account includes unlimited free electronic payments with no monthly fee, which is genuinely the cleaner deal for a business making many payments. If you pay 15 suppliers a week, Tide's Free plan would cost roughly £11 a month in overage and you would sensibly move to Smart at £12.49; Starling would cost £0. That is a real, recurring advantage, and it is the strongest argument for Starling on this page.

Where Tide claws it back is what is included at £0. On Tide's Free plan you get invoice creation and tracking, automatic matching of incoming payments to invoices, expense categorisation, receipt capture, a savings account paying interest and the option to add extra sub-accounts on paid tiers. Starling's equivalent bookkeeping tools sit largely in its paid Business Toolkit add-on or in third-party marketplace apps. For a freelancer sending eight invoices a month, the transfer allowance never binds and the free toolset is worth more than unlimited payments they will not use.

Cash: Starling wins, and it is not close

Neither provider has branches, so both route cash through the Post Office and PayPoint networks. Tide charges £2.50 for a Post Office deposit up to £500, then 0.99% of the value above that on the Free plan (0.5% on paid plans), and 3% at PayPoint. Cash withdrawals at an ATM cost £1.

Starling's cash-deposit pricing is generally lower per deposit and better suited to anyone paying in regularly. If you take £400 of cash a week, Tide would cost about £10 a month in deposit fees before you have paid for anything else — enough to change the verdict entirely. A market stall, a barber, a takeaway or a cash-taking tradesperson should open Starling and not agonise over it.

The nuance is frequency, not existence. A consultant who is handed cash three times a year pays £7.50 in total, which is not a reason to choose a different bank. We draw the line at roughly monthly: bank cash more often than that and Starling's pricing wins.

Lending and credit

Starling lends from its own balance sheet. Eligible customers can apply for overdrafts, unsecured business loans and asset finance, and Starling has an established record of participating in government-backed lending schemes. That matters if your business has lumpy working capital and you want a facility from the institution that already sees your cash flow.

Tide does not lend directly. It introduces partner-provided credit — invoice finance, term loans and merchant cash advances — and surfaces credit-score insights on the Max plan. In practice, most freelancers and micro-companies never apply for either; they fund themselves from retained profit and a personal credit card. If borrowing is a live plan rather than a theoretical comfort, Starling is the safer structural choice.

Regulation and deposit protection

Starling Bank holds its own UK banking licence, is authorised by the PRA and regulated by the FCA and PRA, and eligible deposits are protected by the FSCS up to £120,000 per depositor. Simple and familiar.

Tide's structure needs one extra sentence but is not a weakness. Tide itself is an FCA-authorised e-money institution rather than a bank, but its business current accounts are provided by ClearBank, a UK-authorised bank, using ClearBank's sort code 04-06-05. Eligible deposits held there attract the same £120,000 FSCS protection as Starling's — because it is ClearBank's banking licence, not Tide's e-money permission, that the cover sits behind — subject to the usual eligibility rules and to aggregation with any other balances you hold with the same bank. Our guide to Tide and FSCS protection walks through exactly which balances qualify, and you can verify both firms on the FCA Register.

Opening the account

Both applications are photo-ID-and-selfie affairs completed on a phone in fifteen minutes. In our testing Tide approved the account the same working day; Starling took slightly longer and asked more follow-up questions about a newly incorporated company with no trading history.

Tide also does something Starling does not: it will incorporate your limited company for £14.99, Companies House fee included, and open the business account against the new company in the same flow. If you have not incorporated yet, that removes a step and saves roughly £35 against paying a formation agent separately.

The REFER200 partner code

Tide has a standard customer refer-a-friend route, and then it has partner codes. REFER200 is a partner code, and it pays materially more than the usual friend referral: up to £200 in total, made up of £75 after you open the account and spend £100 on the Tide card within 30 days, plus £125 after depositing at least £5,000 into Tide Instant Saver within seven days and leaving it there for a month. The savings half only makes sense if you genuinely have £5,000 to park; the £75 half is achievable for almost any trading business.

Treat it as a tiebreaker, not a reason. A one-off £200 is worth less than £10 a month of avoidable cash-deposit fees over a year. But if you were already leaning Tide because you bank electronically, it is free money on the way in. Offer terms checked 29 August 2026.

The verdict

Choose Tide if your income arrives by bank transfer or card, you want invoicing and expense tracking without another subscription, you would like a savings pot inside the same app, you are incorporating a company anyway, or you want the account open today. That is the majority of sole traders, freelancers, contractors and small limited companies — and it is the case where the REFER200 bonus is simply a bonus.

Choose Starling if you pay cash in most weeks, if you make dozens of payments a month and refuse to pay for a plan, or if you want the possibility of an overdraft or loan from the same bank. Those are real advantages and we are not going to write around them.

And if you cannot decide, open both on their free tiers. Run Tide as the invoicing and trading account, keep Starling for cash and as a contingency. It costs nothing, it removes single-provider risk, and it is what several of the business owners we speak to already do.

Tide vs Starling FAQs