Your Bank of America Savings Earns the Bank 3.53%. It Pays You 0.04%.

If your emergency fund sits in a Bank of America savings account, the bank told the SEC this week how wide a margin it keeps on that money. The number is 3.53%.

You get 0.04%.

That gap isn’t a guess. It’s printed in the bank’s own quarterly filing, in a row most customers will never see.

The row they don’t advertise

Every quarter, Bank of America files a supplement with its earnings. Page 15 lists “deposit spreads” for its consumer bank, product by product. A deposit spread is roughly what your money is worth to the bank minus the interest it pays you. Bank of America labels it as excluding noninterest costs, so it’s measured before branches and staff.

For savings accounts, the spread was 3.53% in the third quarter of 2026.

A year earlier it was 3.28%. Then 3.33%, 3.39%, 3.46%, and now 3.53%. Four quarters, four increases. The bank’s take on your savings went up every single time.

Your rate didn’t. SwitchWize, which tracks posted rates at 64 banks, lists Bank of America’s savings account at 0.04% APY as of October 16.

Bank of America isn’t an outlier, either. It’s just the only one of these three that breaks savings out by itself. JPMorgan Chase reported a 2.78% deposit margin for its consumer bank. Wells Fargo reported a 2.68% deposit spread for consumer and small business banking. Those blend in checking accounts, which pay close to nothing. Both banks pay 0.01% on standard savings, per SwitchWize.

What it costs you

Run it on $10,000.

At 0.04%, Bank of America pays you about $4 a year. At its 3.53% spread, the bank’s take on that same $10,000 is about $353 a year before costs.

Now move it. The best savings accounts SwitchWize tracked on October 16 paid 4.20% to 4.27%. At 4.20%, $10,000 earns about $420 a year. That’s roughly $416 more than you’re getting now.

Bank’s bet: you won’t read page 15, and you won’t bother to move.

Fair point on their side: branches, ATMs and fraud teams cost money, and the spread pays for some of that. Fine. Keep your checking there if you value the branch. There’s no reason your savings has to pay for the lobby too.

The move

Open a high-yield savings account at an FDIC-insured online bank this week. Link it to your Bank of America checking. Move everything except a month of bills.

Then check the rate every quarter. Online banks cut too, and the spread math works on them as well. Plug your balance into our savings calculator to see the year-one difference, and compare current picks on our best savings accounts page.

The national average savings rate is 0.37%, per the FDIC’s September table. If your account pays anything close to that, you’re the spread.

The detail

Bank of America’s consumer savings balances averaged $50.6 billion in the third quarter. At a 3.53% annualized spread, our math puts the quarter’s savings spread at about $446 million, before noninterest costs. The figures come from the consumer banking key indicators table in the supplement filed with the SEC on October 14, 2026. For more on why savings rates and the Fed’s moves drifted apart this fall, read our breakdown of the FDIC’s rate cap table.

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