Millions of people connect a bank account to a budgeting app, a bill-negotiation service, or an automated investing tool without ever paying a separate charge for the privilege. That arrangement may not last. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is working on a new rule that would let banks and credit unions charge outside apps for access to a customer’s own transaction data, a reversal of the fee ban the agency itself finalized only two years ago. That data typically includes checking and savings account balances, transaction histories, and sometimes credit card activity, all pulled directly from the bank with the customer’s consent.
The Rule Being Rewritten From Scratch
The current fee ban comes from the Personal Financial Data Rights rule, which the CFPB finalized in October 2024 under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act. That rule required banks to make a customer’s account and transaction data available to authorized third-party apps on request, and it barred those banks from charging either the customer or the app for providing it. The rule set compliance deadlines running from 2026 through 2030 depending on institution size, with the largest banks scheduled to comply first. The rule applied broadly to depository institutions and other data providers, from the largest national banks down to smaller credit unions, with smaller institutions given more time to comply under that tiered schedule. The bureau itself has estimated that more than 100 million Americans already use some form of consumer-authorized data sharing with third-party financial apps, a scale that helps explain why the fee question drew such heavy attention.
Free retirement updates: A quiet rule change can shrink your Social Security or Medicare check, and no one warns you. The free Retirement Shield newsletter catches these early and tells you what to do. Get it free.
Why a Federal Court Put It on Hold
A bank, a national bank trade association, and a state bank trade association sued over the rule in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Rather than defend it, the CFPB itself told the court in mid-2025 that it now viewed the rule as unlawful and asked to pause the case while it rewrote it. The court agreed, and later granted the bank plaintiffs a preliminary injunction, meaning the 2024 rule is on the books but the CFPB cannot currently enforce it while the reconsideration plays out. That litigation, brought by a bank and its trade associations in the Eastern District of Kentucky, argued the rule’s data-sharing and cost requirements went further than what Congress actually authorized under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act.
The Fee Question at the Center of the Rewrite
In an advance notice published in the Federal Register on August 22, 2025, under Docket No. CFPB-2025-0037, the bureau asked the public directly whether the 2024 rule’s fee ban was the right call, or whether banks and other “covered persons” should be allowed to recover a reasonable rate from third parties, or even from consumers generally, to offset the cost of building and running the data-access systems the rule requires. The bureau received nearly 14,000 public comments before the October 21, 2025 deadline, addressing the fee question along with related issues like who counts as an authorized “representative” of a consumer and how much data security the rule should require. Commenters on both sides used the proceeding to make their case: banks argued that building and maintaining secure data-sharing systems is expensive and that free access effectively subsidizes fintech competitors, while consumer and fintech groups argued that any fee would functionally price out lower-income households from budgeting and payment tools that depend on that connection.
Where the Proposal Stands Right Now
As of this run, no fee-charging rule has been published or finalized. The bureau’s own rulemaking page still shows the August 2025 advance notice as the latest formal Federal Register action under RIN 3170-AB39, and reporting on the bureau’s regulatory activity indicates it submitted a new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review on August 4, 2026, a required step that comes before a proposed rule is published for public comment. Until that formal proposal appears in the Federal Register and works through its own comment period, the fee ban in the 2024 rule remains the rule on paper, even though the court injunction means it isn’t being enforced either.
What It Would Mean for Everyday Banking Apps
If the eventual rule allows banks to charge for data access, the practical effect would likely land on the third-party apps first, and then potentially on the households that use them, depending on whether those companies pass costs through in subscription prices or transaction fees. Popular budgeting and payment apps typically don’t connect directly to a bank’s own systems; they rely on data aggregators that negotiate access on the app’s behalf. Those aggregator agreements are exactly where a new bank fee would likely be charged first, long before it reaches an individual household’s monthly bill, if it reaches households at all. Some of that shift is already happening commercially, separate from the rulemaking: industry tracking of the rule’s status shows JPMorgan and the data aggregator Plaid struck a paid data-access arrangement in September 2025, ahead of any final CFPB rule. For now, households connecting a bank account to a budgeting, payment, or investing app are not being charged under any CFPB rule, because no such rule currently exists. Anyone using a connected banking or budgeting app today can keep using it under the existing terms, since any resulting fee would not take effect until a final rule is published and its own compliance dates arrive.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
More Financial Reading
