The average out-of-network ATM fee is now $4.52, up 4 percent from previous year and 21 percent since 2010, according to a report released Monday from Bankrate.com, a personal finance site that tracks banking costs.
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If you are a few average joe taking out fifty bucks from the ATM, you can now expect to pay a fee of almost ten percent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The rise in fees can be attributed to two components. Prior to 2009, the amount of money USA banks earned from customer fees had risen every single year since 1942, when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. began recording it.
There are almost 420,000 ATMs in the USA, split equally between financial institutions and independent operators, according to Tremont Capital Group, a Boston-based consulting firm that specializes in the ATM industry.
Use a debit card to get cash back at a point of sale, or use a smartphone to search for nearby bank branches, rather than using an out-of-network ATM.
If the fee picture seems bleak to you, the good news is: These ATM fees are much easier to avoid. The first is that banks are casting about for ways to get more money out of their customers.
And there’s more bad news for consumers: Free checking accounts could soon be a thing of the past.
“ATMs are available to the bank’s own customers for free, so the cost of maintaining that network is borne by non-customers making out-of-network transactions, ” he says.
Atlanta has the nation’s highest ATM fees – calculated as the fee charged by the ATM owner, plus the fee charged by the user’s bank – at $5.15.
The lowest ATM fees were in San Francisco, Cincinnati at $3.86, Kansas City at $4.01, Dallas at $4.11 and Seattle at $4.21. Many tiny credit unions, for example, belong to a cooperative ATM network that has 30,000 cash machines around the country.
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Average fees vary by city largely because big national banks price differently depending on the market, while local banks may have unique pricing plans.
