Banks Raise Off-Network ATM Fees

Banks may be cutting the charges for overdrawing your checking account, but other fees are rising. The average cost to use an ATM at a bank other than your own is up more than 12 percent this year, to $2.22, according to Bankrate.com. On top of that charge, which is applied by the institution that owns the ATM, your bank will stick you with an additional fee of $1.32, on average, for straying outside its network.

Fees for bouncing checks also are up, costing an average of $29.58, versus $28.85 in 2008, Bankrate reported in a recently released survey. A decade ago that would’ve run you roughly $21.

Daniel Gross at Slate puts his finger on why banks are jacking up these fees.

Banks need another way to generate cash, and, increasingly, they’re doing so by levying larger fees. . . . The increase in fees is part of a great economywide readjustment in which many goods and services that used to be essentially free during the credit orgy now cost money. But some banks are clearly readjusting more than others. In July, Eric Dash reported in the New York Times that “the nation’s biggest banks—those that received the biggest bailouts from taxpayers, and are once again gaining strength—charge fees that are on average at least 20 percent higher than those at smaller lenders.”

Graph courtesy of Bankrate.com