A Missed Card Payment Averages $26.77, According to CFPB Data:
the 2 charges to know

Two charges that sound alike and aren't

When a payment comes out and there isn't enough in the account, your bank can do one of two things — and the difference matters far more than the names suggest.

If the bank pays it anyway and lets your balance go below zero, you get charged for going overdrawn. The average is $26.77, and 94% of accounts still have one.¹

If the bank refuses to pay it, you get a different charge, usually called a returned-payment or non-sufficient funds fee. The average is $16.82 — down for the fourth year running, and the lowest on record — on 61% of accounts.¹

Read quickly, being refused looks like the better outcome: half the charge. Read properly, it's usually the worse one, and this is the most misunderstood thing about how these charges work.

The cheaper charge that costs more

When the bank refuses the payment, the bill still hasn't been paid. You've paid $16.82 for nothing happening. The company you owe now adds its own late charge — $30 the first time and $41 after that on a credit card, or roughly 5% of the rent under a typical tenancy.² And you still owe the original amount, which now has to be paid again, out of an account that was already short.

Compare that with $26.77, where at least the bill got paid.

So the honest way to put it isn't "being refused is cheaper." It's that being refused doesn't avoid the cost — it just moves it somewhere else, off your bank's list of charges and onto the list belonging to whoever you owe, usually at a higher price. Banks that got rid of overdraft charges by refusing payments instead have genuinely stopped charging you. They haven't stopped it costing you.

The one that charges you twice

The credit card payment is the one to remember, because it sets off both at once.

The payment is set to come out on the 5th. The account is short. Your bank charges you, and the card company charges you a late fee for the payment it never received. One missed day, two companies, $57 to $68 — and neither of them lost a penny, lent you anything for more than a few days, or did any work.

The card also does three things no other bill does. It can push your interest rate up to around 29.99% as a penalty, and that applies to what you already owe. It goes on your credit record after 30 days, which makes everything else you borrow more expensive (The 5 Factors in a Credit Score: 2 of them are two-thirds of it). And the interest keeps running on the unpaid amount. That's why, of all the dates in your month, this is the one to move first (Bills Due Before Payday? the dates can be changed, and hardly anyone knows it).

"Only three a day" is not protection

Most banks put a limit on how many of these charges they'll make in one day. That limit gets described as protecting you. Look at what it actually allows:

Three payments set to come out on the same morning isn't unusual — it's the normal arrangement, because bills bunch up at the start of the month. At Wells Fargo or Regions that ordinary morning costs over $100, and the limit is what stopped it costing more.³

Work out what you're really paying to borrow

A charge you pay to get you through to payday is a loan. Price it like one:

A payday loan covering the same gap works out at about 391% a year, at the usual $15 per $100 for a two weeks. In most of the rows above, going overdrawn is the more expensive of the two — which means the household that felt good about avoiding the payday lender by letting the account go under usually paid more for the same three days.

The last row is a big bank's reduced $10 charge. Still in the hundreds. There's no charge small enough to make a four-day loan cheap when it's a flat fee.

Worth saying: those rates are the same whoever you are. But someone with $3,000 spare never needs four days of credit, so they never pay them. This is a price list only shown to people who are already short.

Where Plenee fits

Every one of these charges shows up as a transaction, which means Plenee can find them — not buried in a "bank fees" total, but named, dated, and traced back to the exact bill that landed on the wrong side of payday. That turns a slow drip nobody adds up into one number with a cause attached, which is what $230 Billion a Year Is the Price of Inattention: the fees worth moving accounts over does generally, applied to the charge that rewards it most.

The takeaway

Learn the two charges, and stop assuming the smaller one is the better result — being refused just moves the cost to whoever you owe, and you still have the bill to pay. Assume a missed card payment costs about $60, not $27, because two companies charge you. And when you pay a charge to get through a few days, work out what that would be as a yearly interest rate before deciding it was the cheap option. It almost never was.