The Monzo Extra upgrade gets you a few extra features for £3 per month
Monzo has shaken up its accounts — it’s done away with Plus and Premium, and now offers three different accounts, Extra, Perks and Max.
Extra is the cheapest of the three and offers a range of additional features that can help you with your budgeting and money management. Here’s what you get with it and whether it’s worth it’s £3 monthly price tag.
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What you get with Monzo Extra vs Monzo Free
We won’t be reviewing all of the features of Monzo Extra in this review, just the ones it’s got in addition to the free Monzo account. If you want to learn more about what you can do with Monzo, you can check out our in-depth review of the account.
| Feature | Monzo Free | Monzo Extra |
| Cost: | Free | £3 per month |
| Spending analysis: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Trends: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Instant spending notifications: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Spending categories: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pots: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Monthly spending summary: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Spend and withdraw abroad for free: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Savings rate: | 4.10% AER (variable) | 4.10% AER (variable) |
| Fee-free cash withdrawals abroad: | £200 | £200 |
| Connect other banks and credit cards: | ❌ | ✓ |
| Virtual cards: | ❌ | ✓ |
| Advanced roundups: | ❌ | ✓ |
| Custom categories: | ❌ | ✓ |
| Auto-spreadsheet: | ❌ | ✓ |
| Credit insights: | ❌ | ✓ |
Monzo Extra benefits
In addition to all of the features of the free Monzo account, you get some additional features to help with budgeting and account management, which are all great features, but I wouldn’t pay £3 per month for it. Here’s more about what you get with Monzo Extra:
Connect other banks and credit cards
You can connect other bank accounts and view them within the Monzo app using Open Banking. This means you can get a better view of your spending — especially as you can categorise your transactions on your other accounts in the same way you would with your Monzo ones.
In addition, you can move money between your accounts easily, however you’ll need to be logged into your other banking apps to be able to do this.
Virtual cards
With Monzo Extra, you can set up and use virtual cards. These can either be connected to your main account or to your pots, which means that it’s easier to budget more efficiently. You can have five live cards at a time, and can create up to nine in each month with a maximum of 100 in the year.
Each virtual card has its own card number and expiry, and if it’s connected to a pot, you can see a summary of your spending with a specific card. Virtual cards are really easy to create and delete, so they’re great for online transactions you’re worried about, or for signing up for free trials for subscriptions.
I personally use virtual cards all the time, with a card for my day-to-day spending, one for subscriptions and regular payments and another for car repairs.
Advanced roundups
If you’ve not used the roundups feature of Monzo, it’s essentially a way of saving money by “rounding up” each payment to the next pound and popping the difference into a savings pot.
With advanced roundups, you can boost the amount saved by automatically putting twice, five times or ten times the spare change into savings. However, all Monzo customers can do similar things (and more) with IFTTT.
Custom categories
You can choose from a range of icons and colours to set custom categories for your spending, then you can set specific types of categories or merchants to be assigned this category.
For example, whenever I spend money for my dog, it’s assigned a “Buddy” category. Fuel goes into its own fuel category.
Auto-spreadsheet
This tool automatically puts all of your spending data into a Google Sheet which is updated in real time. You can then opt to analyse it or make charts however you like.
This is a neat tool, but even as a huge spreadsheet nerd, I’m not graphing up my Monzo spending.
Credit insights
Credit insights is Monzo’s foray into showing you your credit score and report. You can see both your Equifax and TransUnion credit scores and reports, which are updated weekly. It then gives you some insight into how to improve your credit and tracks your actions.
You can get a free Equifax credit score and report with ClearScore and a free TransUnion one with Credit Karma. Both of these will give you tips for improving your credit as part of their free accounts, so while it’s nice to have this in the Monzo app, it’s not worth the extra money.
How does Monzo Extra compare with Monzo Plus?
You can’t get Monzo Plus any more, though you can keep it for now if you already have it. This was a previous tier of Monzo that cost £5 per month. Here’s the main differences between Monzo Plus’ extra benefits and Monzo Extra’s extra benefits.
Although Plus offers the fee-free cash deposit and higher savings rate, they’re not reasons to stick with Plus.
For cash you could just pay into another bank account with a branch or at the Post Office and transfer the money across. While for savings there aren’t only higher rates elsewhere (see our best buy tables), you can even open one via Monzo for the same 4.6% rate.
| Feature | Monzo Plus | Monzo Extra |
| Cost: | £5 per month | £3 per month |
| Card: | Holographic blue card | Coral card (same as free) |
| Savings rate: | 4.60% AER (variable) on up to £100,000 | 4.10% AER (variable) |
| Fee-free cash withdrawals abroad: | £400 | £200 |
| Connect other banks and credit cards: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Virtual cards: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Advanced roundups: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Custom categories: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Auto-spreadsheet: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Credit insights: | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free cash deposits: | 1 fee-free deposit per month | ❌ |
| Discounts and offers: | ✓ | ❌ |
Is Monzo Extra better abroad?
No, there aren’t any additional features or increased limits with Monzo Extra versus its free account, so you might want to instead check out Monzo Perks or Monzo Max, or stick with the free one. You could also consider other travel debit and credit cards.
Customer reviews of Monzo
As this is a fairly new account, there aren’t any reviews of Monzo Extra available to delve into just yet, so we’ll be focusing on reviews of Monzo over at our sister site Smart Money People.
Customers rate Monzo 4.93/5, with customers raving about the customer service, and finding this to be a great app for digital banking.
Some customers had negative experiences when receiving large sums of money — with a few mentioning that their accounts were closed unexpectedly. We cover this issue further in our full Monzo review.
Is Monzo Extra worth it?
Zoe’s analysis
I was so surprised by the lack of extra features in the Monzo Extra plan that I had to double and triple check that I hadn’t missed anything.
Don’t get me wrong, Monzo Extra has some nice-to-have features, but I wouldn’t personally spend £3 per month on it. It may let you budget slightly more efficiently and connect your other accounts, but I’d expect these to come lumped in with another huge benefit rather than be the defining features of the “upgrade”.
The virtual cards are possibly the best part, although I’d sort of expect this to be part of the free account.
So I’d say as an “upgrade”, it’s a bit naff.
When you compare it with Monzo Plus, which was the second tier previously, it offers a lot of the same features for less money, however you lose free cash deposits, can’t withdraw as much abroad and don’t get the better savings rate.
Monzo Extra
| Cost: | £3 per month |
| Benefits: | All Monzo free features |
| Connect other banks and credit cards | |
| Virtual cards | |
| Advanced roundups | |
| Custom categories | |
| Automatic spreadsheet | |
| Credit insights | |
| Card colour: | Same as Monzo Free (Coral) |
| Exclusive savings rate?: | No |