Varo Savings Account Review
- Annual Percentage Yield (APY)
- Up to
5.00%
- Fee
- $0
- Minimum deposit to open
- $0
Our verdict
High APYs, no monthly fees and automatic savings tools.
If you like digital bank accounts and high APYs, you’re looking in the right place. The Varo Savings account offers up to 5% APY on balances up to $5,000. To qualify for this rate and the account, you need the Varo Bank Account (the bank’s checking account) and must receive at least $1,000 in monthly direct deposits. Additional amounts past the $5,000 mark earn 2.50% APY, which is still pretty high. Varo is an online, FDIC-insured bank, but keep in mind you won’t have access to physical branches.
Pros
-
Competitive APY
-
Save your change
-
Save your pay
Cons
-
Strict rules to earn APY
-
Limited deposits
-
No branch locations
What we like about Varo savings
To open a Varo savings account, you need a Varo Bank Account (the checking account). The Varo Bank Account doesn’t have any monthly fees or opening deposit requirements.
Now on to the good stuff.
High APYs
The Varo savings offers a high 5% APY on balances up to $5,000. Balances over $5,000 earn the secondary rate of 2.5%. Either APY is still great, and much higher than national averages.
However, to earn the best 5% APY, you must receive at least $1,000 in qualifying direct deposits per month.
No monthly fees
The Varo Bank Account and the Varo savings account have zero monthly fees, and no opening deposit requirements. Nothing to complain about there!
Automatic savings tools
Like many modern banks, Varo offers the automatic tool called Save Your Change. It’s a round-up feature that helps you save spare change with debit card purchases.
Whenever you use your Varo debit card with this feature turned on, each purchase gets rounded up to the nearest whole dollar. The rounded-up amount is automatically sent to your Varo savings for easy accumulation with no effort on your part.
You can turn on automatic contributions as well with the feature Save Your Pay, where you simply set a percentage of your paycheck to go to savings each payday.
Where it falls short
Varo is an online bank, so you won’t have access to physical branch locations. But if you haven’t visisted a bank branch in years, that may not even be an issue for you. However, you can deposit cash by visiting a Green Dot retailer and pay a fee up to $5.95 per transaction. Varo also offers fee-free ATM transactions for 40,000+ ATMs in the Allpoint network.
The main downside with this account are the direct deposit requirements, and the fact that only up to $5,000 will earn the best rate. If you regulary keep more than $5,000 in your primary savings, you may want to look elsewhere for higher earning potential.
Compare with other savings accounts
Use the table to see how the Varo Savings account’s interest rates, fees and opening deposit requirements compare to other savings accounts.
What is the Finder Score?
The Finder Score crunches over 250 savings accounts from hundreds of financial institutions. It takes into account the product's interest rate, fees, opening deposit and features - this gives you a simple score out of 10.
To provide a Score, Finder’s banking experts analyze hundreds of savings accounts against FDIC-reported national averages as a baseline. Accounts with rates well over the national average are scored the highest, while accounts with rates well below are scored low.
Varo customer reviews and ratings
| BBB accredited | Yes |
|---|---|
| BBB rating | A- |
| BBB customer reviews | 2.98 out of 5 stars, based on 181 customer reviews |
| Trustpilot score | 3.8 out of 5 stars, based on 3,038 customer reviews |
| Apple App Store Score | 4.9 out of 5 stars, based on 233,500 customer reviews |
| Google Play Score | 4.7 out of 5 stars, based on 242,000 customer reviews |
| Customer reviews verified as of | 06 February 2025 |
Varo gets pretty good reviews for an online bank. On Trustpilot, most of its reviews are 5-star ratings. Customers across review platforms praise the automatic savings tools, its credit-building card called the Varo Believe card, say the app is simple to use, many say the customer support is quick and responsive, and overall, customers like the lack of fees.
Savings account ratings
★★★★★ — Excellent
★★★★★ — Good
★★★★★ — Average
★★★★★ — Subpar
★★★★★ — Poor
We analyze top savings accounts and rate them one to five stars based on factors that are most important to you. These factors include: interest rates, monthly fees, minimum deposits, customer service and account features.
Bethany Finder
Banking editor
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