Wise Business against Revolut Business, read as two legal entities and two price models

Wise Business vs Revolut Business looks like a price comparison, and it's tempting to treat it as one. I don't think it is. Underneath the two apps sit a bank and an e-money institution, and a pricing model that charges by the conversion against one that charges by the month. Which is cheaper for FX depends almost entirely on how much you convert and when, and the answer flips at a volume that's easy to work out once the fee pages are open side by side, which is what I did on 16 and 17 September 2026. Anyone who tells you one of them is simply cheaper hasn't said at what volume, in which currency or on which day of the week, and those are the only variables the answer actually depends on.

I'll say where I started, because I got it wrong. I had assumed Revolut would win on any business converting regularly, since its plans advertise exchange "at the rates used between banks". That holds inside the allowance. Outside it, the picture changes fast, and the allowance on the cheapest plan is smaller than I'd pictured. I was wrong about the entry point as well. I went into this expecting a free UK plan, and on 17 September 2026 the UK plans page showed none.

The two companies are different kinds of company

Before the fees, the licence. In the UK, Revolut Business sits with Revolut Bank UK Ltd, which had its restrictions lifted on 11 March 2026, so eligible deposits carry Financial Services Compensation Scheme cover up to 120,000 pounds. Wise Business in the UK is Wise Payments Limited, an electronic money institution, and Wise says plainly that e-money isn't covered by the FSCS; your balance is safeguarded instead. In the EU, Revolut Business runs through Revolut Bank UAB in Lithuania, with an Irish IE IBAN on the Irish plans page.

That's a whole article on its own, and we've written it separately. I won't repeat the detail of it here. For this comparison it matters for one reason, and it's a simple one. If you plan to hold large balances rather than pass money through, the licence may decide the question before the price does, and no amount of saved conversion fees makes up for picking the wrong protection for a reserve you can't afford to have tied up.

Revolut Business fees, plan by plan

Revolut's UK fee schedules say "This version will apply from 17 February 2026". The plans page lists Basic from £10 a month, Grow from £30 and Scale from £90, and the "from" prices reflect annual billing. The per-plan schedules are clearer. Grow is "£35 per month or £360 per year". Scale is "£125 per month or £1,080 per year". Basic is £10 a month, and annual billing exists only for Grow, Scale and Enterprise.

The FX line is the one that matters here. Each plan gets a monthly allowance at the interbank rate: £1,000 on Basic, £15,000 on Grow, £60,000 on Scale. Past that, the plans page says, there's a "0.6% fee for exchange over this monthly allowance" and a "1% fee for exchanges outside market hours". I went looking for a definition of market hours in the Scale schedule and found only the phrase "outside of foreign exchange market hours", so I can't tell you precisely when a Friday evening conversion starts costing the higher rate.

Transfers come with their own allowances too. International transfers without a fee run 0, 5 and 25 a month on the three plans, then £5 each. Local transfers in GBP, EUR and CHF run 10, 100 and 1,000, then £0.20 each. Incoming Fedwire payments to a USD account cost £8 each "starting with the first transfer", and ATM withdrawals on the card carry a 2% fee. The plans page lists 25+ currencies for UK accounts and 30+ on the Irish one. Whether the UK plan prices include VAT, I don't know; the Grow schedule doesn't use the word VAT at all.

Wise Business fees, which work the other way round

Wise charges once to open the door and then by the transaction. It's a model that rewards the company converting a little, often, and in the pairs Wise prices lowest, and it quietly punishes the company that assumed a percentage would always stay small without ever multiplying it by a busy quarter's volume. The UK pricing page reads "All in for 50 GBP". In euros it depends on the country page you land on: 55 EUR on the German one, and 60 EUR on the Irish one when I checked it on 17 September, which is a small difference and a useful reminder that one brand can quote several prices for the same step. Registering an account costs nothing. The paid step is account details, which let you receive in 22 currencies, and Wise says you can hold and convert 40+.

Conversion carries a variable fee that the UK page lists as "From 0.24%" and the euro page as "From 0.2%" for EUR to USD. Wise says it doesn't "inflate the mid-market exchange rate". Fair enough, as far as it goes. The word "from" is carrying real weight, though, because the fee varies by currency and the page doesn't publish a single number for every pair. There's a volume discount once you "spend over 20,000 GBP", but I couldn't find its size or whether the threshold is monthly, so I've left it out of the sums below. I have not found a page that states the discount as a number, and I looked more than once.

Receiving domestic payments is free in 9 currencies, including GBP, EUR and USD. Swift receipts cost a fixed fee: 6.11 USD for a USD wire, 2.16 GBP for a GBP Swift payment, 2.39 EUR for a EUR one. Holding money in the account costs nothing at all, which is more generous than it sounds when you compare it with providers that charge for idle balances or for simply keeping an extra currency open that you touch twice a year. ATM withdrawals are free up to 250 GBP a month, then 2.69% of the amount over that.

Which is cheaper for FX, at three volumes

Here's the arithmetic, using only the published figures. For Wise I've used the lowest published rate, 0.24%, which flatters Wise on any currency pair that costs more. For Revolut I've used monthly billing and assumed every conversion happens inside market hours, which flatters Revolut. Neither assumption is safe for your own mix, and I'd rerun the sums with your real pairs.

Monthly cost of conversion plus plan fee, from Wise and Revolut UK pricing pages read on 16 and 17 September 2026. Wise figure excludes the one-off 50 GBP set-up fee and any volume discount.

GBP converted per month	Wise, at 0.24%	Revolut Basic	Revolut Grow	Revolut Scale
5,000	12 pounds	10 + 24 = 34 pounds	35 pounds	125 pounds
15,000	36 pounds	10 + 84 = 94 pounds	35 pounds	125 pounds
50,000	120 pounds	10 + 294 = 304 pounds	35 + 210 = 245 pounds	125 pounds

At 5,000 pounds a month Wise costs about 12 pounds and the cheapest Revolut plan about 34, because 4,000 of the 5,000 sits over Basic's allowance at 0.6 per cent. At 15,000 the Grow plan's allowance swallows the whole amount and Revolut costs a flat 35 pounds against Wise's 36, which is close enough to call a draw. At 50,000 Wise sits at 120 pounds on the lowest rate and Scale at 125. So the honest answer to which is cheaper for fx is that below Grow's allowance Wise usually wins, around 15,000 a month the two meet, and above that it depends on the pair and on how the Wise volume discount works, which I can't see.

A short digression on the weekend. Revolut's 1% outside market hours is the fee I'd watch most closely, because it doesn't care about your plan. A company that settles overseas invoices on a Saturday morning pays 1% on those conversions whether it's on Basic or Scale, and on 20,000 pounds that's 200 pounds for choosing the wrong day of the week. I didn't see a separate weekend rate on Wise's pricing page. Right, back to the numbers. The weekend fee is the easiest one to avoid and, I'd guess, the one that slips past most finance teams, simply because nobody schedules a conversion with the foreign exchange calendar in mind.

Wise Business account limits, and Revolut's

People search for wise business account limits expecting a ceiling on the balance. Wise's help centre says "For most currencies, there's no limit on how much you can receive to your account". The caps it does publish are for USD details held with its partner bank, CFSB: 50 million dollars per transaction and per day for business accounts, and 150 million over a rolling 365 days. I didn't find a general holding limit for UK or EU business accounts, and I'm not going to invent one, because a made-up ceiling in a comparison piece tends to get copied into the next ten comparison pieces and then into somebody's board paper, and I cannot say whether the silence means no such limit exists or that it lives in a help article I didn't reach. It's an open question for Wise. Ask them in writing, and keep the reply.

Revolut's limits that I could confirm are about cash. The Grow schedule says you can withdraw up to £5,000 per 24 hours at an ATM. The plans page also shows a £10,000 daily figure, and I couldn't tie it to a specific plan from the text I read. I'm slightly annoyed by that, if I'm honest, because a number that specific shouldn't float on a pricing page without saying who it belongs to, and it's precisely the kind of figure somebody will quote back to a support agent later.

What the fee pages don't settle

Neither page answers the question I'd actually ask on a bad day: how long it takes to reach a human when a payment is stuck. I don't have a number for that for either provider, and I'd distrust anybody who gave you one from a handful of anecdotes. I find it hard to compare 2 companies properly without that figure, and I still don't know a reliable public source for it. Status pages tell you when a system was down. They don't tell you how long a frozen payment sat in a queue while a finance director refreshed the app, which is the experience people actually remember and the one no pricing page will ever list. Neither company publishes that figure.

I suspect most small companies would be better served by the boring split than by picking a winner. Keep the operating balance and the reserve where a deposit scheme applies, convert through whichever provider's pricing suits the month's volume, and don't let either app become the only door to the company's money. I would guess that advice sounds dull next to a league table. It's also the version I'd follow with my own company's cash. That's an instinct built from reading the documents, not from a survey of customers.

If you convert under 5,000 pounds a month in major pairs, Wise's per-transaction model is hard to beat on the published numbers. If you convert steadily in the 15,000 to 60,000 range during the week and want a bank licence behind the balance, a Revolut plan sized to your volume starts to make sense. Between those, I'd put your last 3 months of conversions into both pricing pages and let the arithmetic decide, because the fee pages change and mine will go stale before theirs do.