Revolut vs N26 in 2026: Which Is Best?

Revolut and N26 are the two biggest neobanks in Europe, but they take very different approaches to digital banking. This comparison sticks to what can be checked at source: plan prices, the fee rules that are most often reported wrongly, and which entity actually holds your money.

Account Types & Pricing

N26 runs four personal plans, not three. Standard is free, Smart is €4.90 a month, Go is €9.90 a month, and Metal is €16.90 a month, per N26's own plan comparison read on 11 August 2026. Go is the tier most older comparisons omit, and it is the one that matters for travel, for the reason in the next section.

Revolut is also tiered, from a free Standard account up through paid tiers that raise limits and add travel and insurance perks. We are not printing Revolut's monthly prices here, and that is deliberate: the line-up and the price differ by country, and Revolut's pricing page blocks automated access, so any figure we copied would be unsourced and undated within weeks. Read the current plans on Revolut's own site before you decide on price.

Foreign Exchange — the part most comparisons get wrong

This is the section where published figures, including our own earlier version of this page, are routinely wrong. Two different fees get mixed together.

Card payments in a foreign currency are free on every N26 plan, at Mastercard's exchange rate, and N26 states that it does not mark that rate up. The frequently-quoted 1.7% is not a card-payment fee. It is a fee on cash withdrawals outside the eurozone, and it applies on N26 Standard and Smart while being waived on Go and Metal.

Free ATM withdrawals in euros are capped per month and rise with the plan: two on Standard, three on Smart, five on Go, eight on Metal.

Revolut's strength is holding and exchanging multiple currencies in-app, with free exchange up to a monthly fair-usage allowance on the free plan and a percentage fee beyond it; the allowance and the out-of-hours treatment vary by plan and market, so check them on the plan page rather than assuming "free FX" is unconditional.

The practical read: if your spending abroad is on the card, N26's card fee is zero on every plan and the tier you pay for buys you ATM cash, not cheaper spending. If you actually need to hold euros, dollars and pounds side by side, that is Revolut's territory rather than N26's.

Who holds your money

This is the most important difference and the one usually described incorrectly.

N26 is a licensed German bank, N26 Bank SE, based in Berlin. Deposits are protected up to €100,000. That protection comes from the German statutory deposit guarantee scheme implementing the EU deposit guarantee directive — not from a "European Deposit Insurance Scheme", which has been proposed at EU level but does not exist as an operating scheme. An earlier version of this article said otherwise and was wrong.

For customers in the European Economic Area, Revolut's account is provided by Revolut Bank UAB, authorised by the European Central Bank and the Bank of Lithuania, with deposits insured up to €100,000 by the Lithuanian state deposit-insurance company. Revolut also states that virtual currencies, commodities and investments are not covered by that scheme — so crypto and stocks held in the same app as your salary do not carry the same protection the salary does.

Both are therefore licensed banks with the same €100,000 statutory ceiling. The difference is which country's scheme pays out, not whether one exists.

What the regulators have on the record

Supervisory history is public, and it is a fair input to a decision as long as it is read accurately.

BaFin, Germany's regulator, ordered a package of measures against N26 Bank SE on 15 December 2025: establish proper business organisation, accept a special representative, meet additional capital requirements, and stop writing new mortgage business in the Netherlands. BaFin's stated basis was a 2024 special audit and the 2024 annual-accounts audit, which found serious deficiencies in risk management, complaints handling and the organisation of the lending business. Separately, on 21 May 2024 BaFin published a legally final fine of €9.2 million for systematically late suspicious-activity reports during 2022.

None of that is a solvency finding and none of it changes deposit protection. It is, though, a documented regulator view that complaints handling has been weak — which is worth knowing if service quality is what you are choosing on. We cover the wider question in how safe are neobanks, and if you want to verify any of this yourself, how to check a bank licence shows where the registers are.

Features

Both offer spending insights and automatic categorisation. Revolut is the broader product — multi-currency accounts, stock and crypto trading, and a wide set of add-ons — while N26 is the narrower one, with Spaces sub-accounts for budgeting and a simpler surface. Whether "more product" is a benefit depends entirely on whether you want your investments and your current account in the same app; the deposit-protection note above is one reason some people deliberately do not.

The Verdict

Choose Revolut if: you travel frequently, hold more than one currency, or want an all-in-one app — accepting that the investment side of it sits outside deposit insurance.

Choose N26 if: you want a plain, well-designed euro bank account with free foreign-currency card spending on every plan, and you do not need multi-currency balances.

Choose neither if: what you actually need is currency conversion rather than a bank account — Wise does that job at the mid-market rate with a stated fee, though it is an e-money institution rather than a bank and is safeguarded rather than deposit-guaranteed.

If you are weighing a move away from N26 specifically, N26 alternatives covers the wider shortlist and the switching order. This is general information, not financial advice.