Barclays axes Blue Rewards monthly cashback – should you ditch it?

• £3 a month fee, UNLESS you pay in £1,500 or more a month.

Ended on Tuesday 17 June:
• The free £5 cash, cinema ticket or digital magazines you could earn each month by meeting certain conditions. If you signed up for one of these before Tuesday 17 June, you'll still get it for now – see full info on what happens to existing rewards.

From Monday 7 July:
• Fee-free debit card spending abroad. Currently, Halifax charges a 2.99% foreign currency transaction fee, so £100 worth of euros costs you just under £103. Plus there's an additional 50p fee on each purchase, unless you're spending in Euros in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway.

Removing these fees is a good improvement but there are lots of other ways to slash the cost of spending abroad, so it's not worth sticking with the Reward account just for this, especially if you can't meet the minimum pay-in of £1,500 a month to avoid the £3 monthly account fee.

From 1 October 2025:
• Up to 3% interest on up to £5,000. You'll get 1.5% on up to £3,999 and 3% on any part of your balance between £4,000 to £5,000 (nothing above). To get this, you'll need to have two or more Direct Debits coming out of your account each month.

In comparison, the top savings currently pay up to 4.92% for easy access or up to 4.55% to fix. See our Top savings accounts guide for full details.

Even if you prefer to keep money in your current account, you can easily earn more elsewhere, for example 3.15% on your entire balance (up to £500,000) with app-based bank Kroo. For full info and more options, see our Top bank accounts guide.

• Reward Bonus Saver and ISA Reward Bonus Saver both offering 3.25% AER variable if you make three or fewer withdrawals in a year (dropping to 0.95% after the fourth). These are really nothing special. Right now, the top standard easy-access account pays 4.75%, while the top cash ISAs are at 4.92%.

• £100 interest-free overdraft buffer for new and existing customers.

• Up to 15% debit card cashback at certain retailers. This isn't unique – Barclays, Lloyds, Monzo, Santander and Virgin Money all run similar schemes.