Best Debit Cards for Kids: Every Fee Totalled

Every comparison page for kids’ debit cards prints a monthly price. Almost none of them multiplies it out. A card opened at eight and cancelled at eighteen is a 120-month commitment, and at Greenlight’s top tier that is $2,397.60.

This page carries three tables: every published fee, the ten-year total for each plan, and one nobody else prints — whether the advertised "3% savings" is actually interest. All prices were checked against each company’s own pages on 24 August 2026, and every figure says where it came from. Where a company does not publish a number, the cell says "not published" rather than guessing.

It names no winner. "Best" in the title is the search query, not a verdict.

The short version

• Six products cost $0 a month — Chase First Banking, Capital One MONEY Teen Checking, Cash App’s sponsored teen accounts, Step’s base tier, Till’s free tier and Modak’s MoBasic. Each carries a constraint that is the reason it is free.
• Across the paid plans the ten-year spread is $358.80 to $2,397.60 — a factor of nearly seven for products that all issue a piece of plastic to a child.
• The cheapest card depends on how many children you have. FamZoo charges one fee for unlimited kids, Modak covers seven, Greenlight five, Acorns four cards, BusyKid one.
• Most of the advertised "rates" are not interest. Step’s own help centre says so in as many words. The FDIC national average for actual savings deposits is 0.38%.

The fee table

Every populated cell below came from the provider’s own site on 24 August 2026 (Greenlight and Acorns) or 23 August 2026 (everything else). A blank is not zero — where a fee is not published, the cell says so.

Sources, all fetched on the dates given: greenlight.com/plans and /no-hidden-fees (24 August 2026); acorns.com/early (24 August 2026); Chase First Banking, Capital One MONEY Teen, Cash App for teens, Step’s fee article, Till’s FAQ, Modak’s pricing page, BusyKid pricing and its FAQ, and FamZoo’s fee disclosures (all 23 August 2026). Greenlight’s replacement-card terms come from its help centre via the Greenlight and Acorns Early comparison.

Two products were left out rather than filled in from third-party pages. Current publishes no retrievable pricing page (current.com/teen-banking returned 404 on 23 August 2026), and Revolut’s US Kids & Teens pages block automated retrieval. Importing a competitor’s numbers for either would defeat the point of the table.

What ten years actually costs

This is the section that made the page worth writing. The horizon is ages 8 to 18, matching the ten-year window used in the Greenlight and Acorns Early comparison, so the two pages agree.

annual = monthly × 12 (or the published annual price)
ten-year = annual × 10
per child = ten-year ÷ children covered

Three notes belong with that table rather than under it.

• Greenlight sells no annual plan. The $71.88, $131.76, $191.76 and $239.76 figures are annualised from the monthly price, not prices Greenlight prints. Its plans page and its fee disclosures were both checked on 24 August 2026 and neither carries an annual rate or an annual discount.
• BusyKid’s actual annual charge is not published. The pricing page says "$4/mo. (billed annually)" and gives no yearly total. $480.00 is 4 × 12 × 10 from the published monthly figure — the best available arithmetic, not a quoted price.
• FamZoo advertises an extra month. Its site says "Prepay $59.90 for 12 months" and "Plus extra free month". Whether that recurs every year or applies only to the first is not published, so the table uses $59.90 a year flat.

One arbitrage falls straight out of the arithmetic: Till Premium costs $168.80 more over ten years billed monthly than billed annually ($958.80 against $790.00) for the identical product.

For scale against what actually passes through the card, the allowance calculator and the allowance-by-age guide put a figure on the money the subscription is administering. And on the fee itself: $239.76 a year set aside for ten years is $2,397.60 deposited, or $2,448.29 at the FDIC national savings average of 0.38% — that figure assumes each year's deposit is made at the start of the year rather than the end (an "annuity-due"), which is why it runs higher than the $2,439.02 you'd get computing it the other way. You can run other rates through the savings by 18 calculator. That is arithmetic on a number, not a suggestion about what to do with it.

Per family or per child?

A one-child family and a four-child family should read different rows off the same table, and most comparison pages do not let them. Coverage varies more than price does.

FamZoo states it twice: fees are "per family. Period.", and "Adding family members and adding cards does not impact your subscription fee." Note that Acorns’ own wording is "up to 4 debit cards", which is not quite the same claim as four children. And note that Greenlight’s five-kid cap does not raise the $5,000 family cap on its savings reward — the Greenlight comparison works that through.

The free options, and what you give up

Six products cost nothing a month. Each is free for a specific reason, and the reason is the constraint.

• Chase First Banking — "$0 Monthly Service Fee", but "You need to be a Chase checking customer to open a Chase First Banking account." Designed for ages 6–12, available 6–17. Its page states no interest.
• Capital One MONEY Teen Checking — "No monthly or maintenance fees—even after your teen turns 18", a real bank account, and "70,000+ fee-free Capital One and partner ATMs". One account per teen, held jointly with a parent or guardian.
• Cash App sponsored accounts — "no monthly or hidden fees" for ages 13–17, with a sponsor who "can see balances, monthly statements and real-time transactions". Cash App states the account is not FDIC insured.
• Step’s base tier — "no monthly subscription fees, no account minimum fees, no in-network ATM fees". Cash deposits cost $3.95 and a replacement card $5.00.
• Till’s free tier — free, but it issues a digital card only; a physical one is $5.00 each.
• Modak MoBasic — $0 covering up to seven children, card issued by Legend Bank, N.A.

The seventh option is no card at all. A family ledger costs nothing and carries no subscription, and it does none of what a card does: no independent spending, no merchant controls, no ATM access. How to run a bank of mom and dad covers that side of it.

"Earn 3.00%" — which of these rates is real

Several of these products advertise a percentage on savings. They are three different mechanisms, and none of the pages we could retrieve separates them.

Sources for the rates above, all checked 27 August 2026: Cash App for teens; Step's savings page; Till's FAQ; Modak's pricing page; and Greenlight's rewards page.

Capital One’s rate cannot be quoted here, because Capital One is not currently publishing it. Both its product page and its disclosure page render the literal string NaN where the number belongs — "As of 8/20/2026, they’ll earn an annual percentage yield (APY) of NaN on any balance" — dated 8/20/2026 on the product page and 8/5/2026 on the disclosure, both checked 23 August 2026. The only secondary source carrying a figure is published by a direct competitor. So the honest cell says the rate is a real bank APY whose value is not currently readable.

The benchmark row is the point of the table. The FDIC’s national rate for savings is 0.38%, with interest checking at 0.07% and the national rate cap at 4.38% — page stamped "Last Updated: August 17, 2026" and checked 24 August 2026 (fdic.gov). The FDIC defines it as "the average of rates paid by all insured depository institutions and credit unions for which data is available, with rates weighted by each institution’s share of domestic deposits", and its footnote adds that savings and interest-checking rates "are based on the $2,500 product tier".

So a "3.00%" a company funds out of its marketing budget and a "0.38%" that is the national average on insured deposits are not the same kind of number. Only one of them is a rate on your child’s money in the ordinary sense. The compound interest calculator will run any of them.

The fees under the headline price

The monthly price is the only number most listicles carry. These are the ones that show up later, all from provider pages checked 23 August 2026.

• BusyKid — funding by credit or debit card costs 2.9% + $0.30 (from a checking account it is free); international transactions $2.50; a BusyPay transfer $1.00 plus the transaction cost; declined transactions $0.50 each from the fifth decline in a month; replacement card $5.00.
• Step — cash deposits $3.95; replacement card $5.00; an out-of-network ATM fee exists but its amount is not published ("there will be a fee for out-of-network ATM usage starting May 2024").
• FamZoo — the first four cards free, then $3.00 each; the first three replacements free, then $3.00; express delivery $25.00; per-purchase and inactivity fees $0.00.
• Till — physical cards $5.00 each on the free tier, included for up to five children on Premium.
• Greenlight — one free replacement card per family per calendar year, then $5.99 each. Reload, funding and overdraft terms are not on its fee-disclosures page.

On ATMs specifically: several providers say they charge $0, which is true and incomplete, because the machine’s owner still charges. Bankrate’s 2025 checking survey put the average total out-of-network ATM withdrawal at $4.86 — a $3.22 operator surcharge plus $1.64 from the account holder’s own bank — fielded 2 June to 3 July 2025 across 245 institutions in 25 markets and published 10 September 2025 (bankrate.com, checked 23 August 2026). That is the current edition; there is no 2026 one.

"FDIC-insured" on a card from a company that isn’t a bank

Most of these products are not banks. They partner with one, and the insurance reaches your child’s balance by a mechanism called pass-through coverage. None of the pages we could retrieve explains what that does and does not cover.

The FDIC is direct about the limit: "FDIC deposit insurance does not protect against the insolvency or bankruptcy of a nonbank company." Money may still be recoverable through an insolvency or bankruptcy proceeding, but "recovery may take some time", and for pass-through coverage to work "records must be kept to identify who owns the money and the specific amount that each person owns" (FDIC, Banking With Third-Party Apps, published 31 May 2024, checked 23 August 2026).

Pass-through coverage is "a method of insuring depositors whose funds are placed and held at an FDIC-insured bank through a third party", and it carries three conditions: the funds must be "in fact owned by the principal and not by the third party"; the account records must indicate "the agency nature of the account"; and records must show "the identities of the principals as well as their ownership interests" (FDIC, page updated 29 May 2024).

Every one of those conditions depends on recordkeeping a parent never sees. Two events show what happens when it fails.

Copper. The teen banking app discontinued its deposit accounts and debit cards on 13 May 2024 in the Synapse collapse: "this event has forced us to close banking accounts much sooner than expected" (TechCrunch, 21 May 2024). getcopper.com today is a rewards app, not a teen card.

Synapse. The CFPB filed against Synapse Financial Technologies on 21 August 2025, with a stipulated final judgment on 12 September 2025, for "failing to maintain adequate records of the location of consumers’ funds". The shortfall was "between $60 and $90 million", and "consumers did not have any access to their funds for weeks or months". The order carried "a prohibition on the sale of customer information, and a $1 civil money penalty" (consumerfinance.gov, checked 23 August 2026).

That is a mechanism, and it applies to the category rather than to any named product here. No provider on this page is being described as safe or unsafe. The useful question to ask of any of them is which bank holds the money and whose name the records are in.

Cancelling

Not one of the eleven ranking pages we could retrieve says how to stop paying for the subscription it recommends. What the providers themselves publish:

• Greenlight — the first monthly fee is "billed to your parent wallet seven days after successful registration", and "To receive a refund of your first monthly fee, you must request to close your account on or before the day immediately preceding your first Monthly Billing Date" (greenlight.com/plans, checked 24 August 2026). Its no-hidden-fees page says "Cancel anytime."
• Step Black — a 7-day free trial, and the fee is waived by a $500 qualifying direct deposit in any 30-day period.
• BusyKid — no refunds on annual subscriptions.
• FamZoo — a one-month free trial.
• Everything else — not published. That is the finding, not an omission on our part.

If you are cancelling because you are switching, what each Greenlight plan costs to replace prices the swap tier by tier, including what leaving does to a child’s investing account.

How we checked this, and when

Greenlight’s four prices and both Acorns prices were re-fetched from greenlight.com/plans and acorns.com/early on 24 August 2026 and were unchanged from the 23 August check. Every other figure came from the provider’s own site on 23 August 2026. Note that greenlight.com/pricing returns a 404 — the live path is /plans.

Prices on comparison pages go stale, and several ranking ones are wrong today. Bankrate, updated 13 August 2026, lists Greenlight’s tiers as "$5.99, $9.98, $14.98 or $19.98" — Max and Infinity each a dollar low against the live $10.98 and $15.98. FinanceBuzz (16 July 2026) and Modak’s own comparison post both price Acorns Early at "$5 to $10 per month" against a live $8 and $12, and bankbonus.com (29 March 2026) carries the same error. One undated page still presents GoHenry as a current US product, which it has not been since 18 November 2024.

That is not universal, and implying otherwise would be the same mistake. Two of the pages we retrieved carried Greenlight’s and Acorns’ prices entirely correctly, and five handled the GoHenry rebrand properly. Note also that the two most prominent competitors for this query, Forbes Advisor and CNBC Select, both blocked retrieval — so every "nobody covers this" claim on this page means "none of the eleven pages we could retrieve", not "no page anywhere".

These figures are re-verified monthly. If you find one that has moved, it has moved since the date stamped beside it.