Tide Review 2026: Business Account Plans, Fees and the FSCS Question

What Tide is

Tide is a UK business account you open from an app rather than a branch: no appointment, no hard credit check, minutes rather than days. It serves sole traders and limited companies, and by its own count more than two million of them. The entry plan carries no monthly fee, which is the reason most people arrive.

What you get on top of the account is the part that distinguishes it from a plain current account — invoicing, Making Tax Digital tools, savings pots including a dedicated Tax Saver, card readers, and accounting connectors. It is built as the finance layer for a small business, not just somewhere to keep money.

Tide plans and pricing 2026

Four plans, all billable monthly or annually. The differences are mostly about volume and about how much of the admin layer is included.

Read down the Free column and one number does all the work. Five bank transfers a month is the real boundary of the free plan — not a fee, a ceiling. Pay four suppliers and your accountant and you have used it. Everything else on Free is usable: the card, direct debits, ATM withdrawals, cash and cheque deposits at the Post Office or a PayPoint, Making Tax Digital tools, and a savings account paying 2% AER.

One oddity worth flagging: invoicing stays capped at three a month all the way through Pro. You pay £27.49 and still get the same three invoices as someone paying nothing. Only Max lifts it. If invoicing volume is your bottleneck, Tide's plans are not the lever — a separate invoicing tool is cheaper than the jump to £69.99.

When a paid plan pays for itself

Two honest calculations, because the marketing points at the wrong one.

The FX fee is the strongest case. Free charges 2.75% on international card payments; every paid plan charges nothing. Spend £455 a month abroad — a couple of SaaS subscriptions and a flight — and Smart has already paid for itself at £12.49.

The savings rate is the weakest case, despite being the most visible difference in the table. Pro pays 3% AER against Free's 2%, a single point. Pro costs £329.88 a year, so on interest alone you need roughly £33,000 parked in the Instant Saver before the plan breaks even. For Max at £839.88 a year against Free, the figure is around £67,000. Buy the plan for transfers and FX; treat the better rate as a bonus, not a reason.

The part most reviews skip: is your money protected?

Tide says it in its own footer, and it deserves to be read: "Tide is not a bank." It is an electronic money institution authorised by the FCA under reference 900843. That is not a warning in itself — it is how most modern business accounts work — but it changes where your deposit protection comes from.

New accounts are ClearBank-powered, so most readers opening one today land in the first group. The distinction matters if you hold a meaningful balance, and it matters twice if you also bank elsewhere with ClearBank — the £120,000 is aggregated across everything you hold with them, not per account.

What customers actually complain about

Tide's public record is good: 4.4 out of 5 across nearly 38,000 Trustpilot reviews, with praise concentrated on how fast onboarding is and how helpful support is once you reach it. The company replies to 99% of negative reviews, usually within a day.

The recurring complaints are worth knowing before you move your main account across. Frozen accounts during compliance checks come up repeatedly — funds temporarily inaccessible while checks run, which for a business mid-payroll is not a small inconvenience. Alongside that: slow responses on urgent issues, declined applications without a clear reason, and heavy sales contact about add-on products after signup. None of that is unique to Tide among app-first providers, but it is the risk you take on with any of them.

Who can actually open one

This is the question that decides it for a lot of readers. Tide requires a UK residential address and phone number. If you are based elsewhere, you can still apply — but only as a director of a company registered with UK Companies House, and additional checks may follow. There is no German IBAN and no euro business account.

What we like about Tide and what we don't

Alternatives worth knowing

Within the UK, the honest comparison is against the other app-first providers and the incumbent banks' free-for-18-months offers — the difference usually comes down to cash handling and to whether you want a real banking licence rather than an EMI plus partner bank. For a full picture of what we track, see our business bank account comparison. If you invoice internationally and the currency side matters more than the account itself, Wise Business solves a different problem and is often held alongside rather than instead.