The $5 Fee Cap Congress Killed Before It Started

On December 30, 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule capping overdraft fees at banks and credit unions with more than $10 billion in assets.▸ Institutions could charge a flat $5, price the fee to recover their own costs, or keep charging profit-generating overdraft fees if they followed the same lending-disclosure rules that apply to any other consumer credit. The CFPB's own regulatory impact analysis put the number on it: at a $5 benchmark fee, consumers would keep $5.2 billion a year that they had been paying in overdraft fees, using 2022 as the baseline year. The rule was set to take effect October 1, 2025.

It never did.▸ On May 9, 2025, President Trump signed S.J.Res. 18, a Congressional Review Act resolution nullifying the rule — enacted as Public Law 119-10. Under the CRA, the CFPB is now barred from writing a "substantially similar" rule unless a future law specifically authorizes it. The $5 cap, and the $5.2 billion built on top of it, do not exist.

With no federal cap in place, the National Consumer Law Center's June 2026 issue brief — built from the same call-report data banks file with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council — puts total overdraft and NSF fees paid to U.S. banks and credit unions in 2025 at an estimated $12.4 billion.▸ JPMorgan Chase alone collected $1.1 billion, and Wells Fargo $924 million; the two of them have taken "about $1 billion each a year" for years running. PNC Bank, well behind the two leaders, took $279 million — up 8% over 2023, the last year the CFPB itself published comparable figures.

The 20 largest consumer banks NCLC tracks collectively earned $4.0 billion of that — meaning roughly $8.4 billion more moved through the thousands of smaller banks and credit unions the issue brief doesn't itemize by name.▸ Overall, revenue at the top 20 banks was up 4.2% in 2025 over 2023. Some of that growth is sharp: Huntington Bank's overdraft revenue rose 40% over that span, M&T Bank's 36%, Citizens Bank's 24%. USAA Federal Savings Bank's rose faster than any other bank on the list, largely because USAA only started charging overdraft fees at all in late 2023.

Averaged across all accounts, the picture looks different.▸ Regions Bank had the highest overdraft revenue per account among the top 20 — $30 a year — with Citizens ($19), TD ($18), Fifth Third and Huntington (both $17), and Wells Fargo ($15) not far behind. Three smaller banks NCLC has flagged in prior years post even higher per-account totals: Woodforest Bank at $94, First Convenience Bank at $68, and Arvest Bank at $45. Navy Federal Credit Union posted $28 per account in 2024 — the last year available, because the National Credit Union Administration stopped requiring credit unions to report the figure at all.

The fees are not spread evenly.▸ In the Federal Reserve's 2025 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, published May 2026, 12% of adults with a bank account said they'd paid an overdraft fee in the prior 12 months — but 25% of Black adults said the same, against 17% of Hispanic adults, 8% of white adults, and 5% of Asian adults. By income, the fee lands hardest on households earning $25,000–$49,999 a year (20%), followed by those under $25,000 (17%); only 6% of adults earning $100,000 or more paid one. The CFPB's own rulemaking had estimated the average household that pays overdraft fees would have saved $225 a year under the $5 cap — money that, per the Federal Reserve's numbers, would have disproportionately gone to Black, Hispanic, and lower-income households.

Not every bank moved the same direction once the pressure was off.▸ NCLC notes that Capital One, Citibank, American Express, and Ally Bank charge no overdraft fees at all, and that BMO Bank cut its overdraft revenue from $27 million in 2023 to $2 million in 2025 after lowering its fee from $36 to $15 — before raising it back to $20 in 2026 and shrinking the no-fee cushion on an account from $50 to $20. Truist's overdraft fees fell 10% over the same span. The rule that would have locked those cuts in industry-wide was the one Congress reversed.

The "other 17 top-20 banks" and "all other banks & credit unions" totals in the flow chart are this publication's own arithmetic — the National Consumer Law Center's published totals minus its named banks — not NCLC line items themselves, and are labeled as derived in the chart's data table.