Monzo Perks review

Here are all of the extra benefits you get with Monzo Perks

Monzo Perks is a new account offered by Monzo that gets you some additional perks, including a weekly sausage roll and an annual Railcard for £7 per month, as well as all the benefits of the Monzo Extra account. Here’s what we think of the account.

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What you get with Monzo Perks vs Monzo Free and Monzo Extra

We won’t be reviewing all of the features of Monzo Perks in this review, just the ones it’s got in addition to the free Monzo account and Monzo Extra. If you want to learn more about what you can do with Monzo, you can check out our in-depth review of the account. Here’s an overview of what you can get.

Feature	Monzo Free	Monzo Extra	Monzo Perks
Cost:	Free	£3 per month	£7 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)	4.60% AER (variable)
Fee-free cash withdrawals abroad:	£200	£200	£600
Connect other banks and credit cards:	❌	✓	✓
Virtual cards:	❌	✓	✓
Advanced roundups:	❌	✓	✓
Custom categories:	❌	✓	✓
Auto-spreadsheet:	❌	✓	✓
Credit insights:	❌	✓	✓
Fee-free cash deposits:	❌	❌	3 free per month
Discounted investment fees:	❌	❌	✓
Free Railcard:	❌	❌	✓
Free Greggs treat:	❌	❌	✓

Monzo Perks benefits

In addition to all of the features of the free Monzo account and the additional features of Monzo Extra, you get a couple of extra things, including a better savings rate and a higher withdrawal limit abroad. Here’s more about what you get with Monzo Perks: 

Higher savings rate

You get a slightly better savings rate of 4.6% AER variable instead of 4.1% AER variable with Monzo perks. This is an instant access account, so you can access it whenever you need it. 

This rate can still be beaten with other savings accounts, which we detail on our savings best buy tables. 

Fee-free cash withdrawals abroad

You get a significantly higher fee-free allowance when withdrawing cash abroad — £600 rather than the usual £200. This is a nice perk if you need to withdraw higher amounts while abroad, or travel a lot. Other allowances when abroad stay the same. We reckon there are still better options when travelling abroad.

Fee-free cash deposits

With Monzo Perks, you can deposit cash into your account without any fees up to 3 times per month. This usually costs £1 per deposit. This means it could save you up to £3 per month — but when was the last time you paid cash into your account?

Get around this by paying money into a different bank and transferring it over. 

Free Railcard

You can nab yourself a free Railcard with a Monzo Perks account. This is actually a pretty decent benefit, usually costing you up to £30 (we often have deals to get them cheaper here). A Railcard can get you a third off rail travel — however, having this account doesn’t mean you’re automatically eligible for one. This depends on your age, where you travel and who you travel with. 

However, don’t just get it for the Railcard — if you don’t use any of the other benefits of the account, this means that the Railcard costs you a massive £84 per year. 

Free Greggs

A nice little perk to the Perks account is that you can get a freebie at Greggs every week. This can be a sausage roll, regular hot drink, doughnut or muffin. 

You’ll pay £1.20 for a sausage roll, and between £1.50 and £2.50 for a hot drink. So if you were to average that at £2 a week, assuming you also manage to claim it every single week (in reality you’ll probably miss a few), that’s worth £104 a year, which means you’d save £20 on this alone.

But this isn’t going to be worthwhile unless you get one most weeks, and you may as well admit that you’ll likely nab yourself a sausage roll or sweet treat to go with that coffee, so you may end up spending more!

Hot coral card

The Monzo Perks card is a little darker than the original Monzo card, though it really doesn’t look very different from the original — I doubt anyone will notice it in a shop.

The Monzo Plus card was a holographic blue — if you have one of these you can keep it until it expires. 

Discounted investment fees

We don’t really cover Monzo’s investments platform in any detail, but there are discounted fees with the Perks plan. 

You get a lower platform fee of 0.35% for investing, as opposed to 0.45% without. This means that with fund fees, you’ll pay 0.49% rather than 0.59%. This is a good fee for investments, but only if you invest with Monzo already. It’s worth shopping around to see if alternatives will be cheaper for you.

How does Monzo Perks 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 Perks’ extra benefits. In general, it’s better for an additional £2 per month, considering the typical cost of a Railcard.

Feature	Monzo Plus	Monzo Perks
Cost:	£5 per month	£7 per month
Card:	Holographic blue card	Hot coral card
Savings rate:	4.60% AER (variable) on up to £100,000	4.60% AER (variable)
Fee-free cash withdrawals abroad:	£400	£600
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	3-fee-free deposits per month
Discounts and offers:	✓	Free weekly Greggs
Free Railcard:	❌	✓
Discounted investment fees:	❌	✓

Is Monzo Perks better abroad?

Monzo Perks is a little better for use abroad versus the Free and Extra accounts, but only if you think you’ll make a lot of withdrawals — you get £600 in fee-free cash withdrawals instead of just £200. The spending limits are the same, though. 

You don’t get travel insurance — this comes with Monzo Max. We’d suggest you take a look at other travel debit and credit cards that might suit you better. 

Customer reviews of Monzo

As Monzo only announced these accounts recently, we can’t gauge how customers feel about it just yet — so we’re looking broadly at 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 Perks worth it?