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Changes to your Premier Account
We’re changing the rules on who can qualify for the HSBC Premier Bank Account. These new rules have been in place since last September for new customers, and from 9 April 2025 they will apply to all Premier customers.
You’ll still be able to enjoy all the benefits of your HSBC Premier Bank Account as long as you meet one of the following eligibility requirements:
Have savings or investments totalling £100,000 or more with HSBC UK. This doesn’t include any balances you hold with M&S Bank, first direct or HSBC Expat.
Have an annual personal income of £100,000 or more coming into your Premier Account. For joint account holders, at least one of you must meet this requirement.
Already have a HSBC Premier Bank Account in another country.|
If you don’t currently meet these requirements, don’t worry there’s nothing for you to do right now. We’ll get back in touch with you about your account if these changes impact you.
—–Very disappointing. When they changed their eligibility criteria for new customers, they explicitly said it did not affect existing customers
I suspect these changes are going to go down like a lead balloon with their customers
The income requirement has only gone up in line with inflation or less; that doesn’t seem unreasonable. And to ask, as an alternative, for £100,000 of savings/investments is a relatively modest requirement for a free bank account with full travel insurance. Barclays Premier doesn’t really offer any benefits and some other bank premier type offerings are paid accounts. It’s also entirely expected after increasing the requirement for new applicants.
How much do you value the free travel insurance at?
I suspect its value is less than the opportunity cost of keeping £100,000 of savings with HSBC compared to a more competitive account (or the cost of getting a packaged bank account elsewhere).
Similarly their HSBC InvestDirect platform doesn’t seem to have changed in over a decade..apart from introducing holding fees.
You don’t need investment or savings, just pay in every month the required amount then spend it or take it out or easiest is just pay your salary in (only one requirement salary or investment/savings)
@gt94sss2 – if someone were relying upon the old minimum investment/savings threshold (as an alternative to the minimum income requirement), presumably they have already got over the hump of the opportunity cost and the merits or otherwise of the HSBC investment platform.
Well, I don’t quite meet that requirement but I haven’t (yet) had this message. If they’re going to downgrade my account, I’d mainly like to understand what they plan to do about my Premier WE CC – through which I have ran a not insignificant sum in the last year, and recently paid £330 to renew for another year (with supplementary card).
I’m hoping that having my mortgage with HSBC will continue to count as an investment product.
I pay HSBC £42 per annum to hold one stock for me. I transferred it in so they didn’t even get a commission on the trade.
Eligibility criteria sorted.
Sneaky @Froggee
I pay HSBC £42 per annum to hold one stock for me. I transferred it in so they didn’t even get a commission on the trade.
Eligibility criteria sorted.
Interesting – how does the HSBC stock holding thing work?
Is the stock value >= £100k?
The income requirement has only gone up in line with inflation or less; that doesn’t seem unreasonable. And to ask, as an alternative, for £100,000 of savings/investments is a relatively modest requirement for a free bank account with full travel insurance. Barclays Premier doesn’t really offer any benefits and some other bank premier type offerings are paid accounts. It’s also entirely expected after increasing the requirement for new applicants.
The increase is from 75k to 100k, how can you say this is in line with inflation or less?🤣🤣
The income requirement has only gone up in line with inflation or less; that doesn’t seem unreasonable. And to ask, as an alternative, for £100,000 of savings/investments is a relatively modest requirement for a free bank account with full travel insurance. Barclays Premier doesn’t really offer any benefits and some other bank premier type offerings are paid accounts. It’s also entirely expected after increasing the requirement for new applicants.
The increase is from 75k to 100k, how can you say this is in line with inflation or less?🤣🤣
Because from 2017 when I first opened my Premier account, the threshold only changed recently. So if you factor in 7-8 years of inflation, then you can see where JDB’s point is coming from
@idrive – perhaps you haven’t noticed this inflation thingy and how dramatically it has impacted your purchasing power, mortgage, pension etc. Quite a lot more serious than tier point threshold inflation.
I don’t remember exactly when HSBC put in the £75,000 threshold, but it’s at least eight years ago and £75,000 in 2016 takes you to almost £101k in today’s money.
is an insurance product still acceptable? I have nothing in savings or investments with HSBC, and currently hold Premier.
Yes, my friend just opened with insurance product.
Like @Froggee, I do something similar put in investment and take out.@memesweeper As far as I am aware that requirement has now been removed.
To qualify and be eligible you will now need a salary paid into the account of at least £100K or savings/investments held with HSBC of at least £100K.
Their wording exactly reads as “Have savings or investments totalling £100,000 or more with HSBC UK. This doesn’t include any balances you hold with M&S Bank, First Direct or HSBC Expat”
“Have an annual personal income of £100,000 or more coming into your Premier Account. For joint account holders, at least one of you must meet this requirement”
“These rules have been in place since last September for new customers, from 9 April 2025 they will apply to all Premier customers”
It seems they are trying to match the requirements of NatWest group and Barclays.
Yes the stock is > £100k. I actually did it to get Jade some time back. Invest Direct is clunky but does work.
I typed a long and super helpful post and then inadvertently closed the tab because I am an idiot.
The summary is if you have £100k kicking about but bemoan HSBC’s interest rates or funds then you can buy gilts and ETFs on Invest Direct and benefit from low fee ETFs or (for anyone who pays tax) the market leading interest rates offered on low coupon gilts which beats all the best buys after adjusting for the tax not paid.
The £42 annual fee is 0.04% of your £100k so is a rounding error to have the benefits of HSBC Premier.
Is the salary/income requirement pre- or post-tax, does anyone know?
@slonik you have to have at least £100K of salary flow through your account. On that basis I would say pre tax.
So you would need £5,713.11 post tax to flow through it every month as salary payment.
Does this mean you are no longer required to have a mortgage with them in addition to the required income?
Also do you actually need to pay the salary in direct from your employer or is moving it in from another account just as good?
@rum yes this is correct. No mortgage required (purely because I haven’t not seen it explicitly mentioned anywhere).
I would presume employer, as when you applied for the account you would’ve provided your employers name and salary amount.
That way they can match up the payments as being your salary, rather than transfers from one personal account to another which could be deemed as regular account payments.
In my scenario my employer pays into my HSBC account, the name matches what I have provided, as does the monthly amount.
@slonik you have to have at least £100K of salary flow through your account. On that basis I would say pre tax.
So you would need £5,713.11 post tax to flow through it every month as salary payment.
The post tax amount doesn’t have to be that. If you increase your pension contributions on a salary sacrifice scheme, post tax could be much lower and the bank is fine with that. Obviously the bank can ask for payslips to check gross income.
@idrive – perhaps you haven’t noticed this inflation thingy and how dramatically it has impacted your purchasing power, mortgage, pension etc. Quite a lot more serious than tier point threshold inflation.
I don’t remember exactly when HSBC put in the £75,000 threshold, but it’s at least eight years ago and £75,000 in 2016 takes you to almost £101k in today’s money.
Ok got it, it makes sense, I understand your point over the period of time you mentioned, i did not initially know or remember the timeframe of the last requirements you were referring to.
@rum yes this is correct. No mortgage required (purely because I haven’t not seen it explicitly mentioned anywhere).
I would presume employer, as when you applied for the account you would’ve provided your employers name and salary amount.
That way they can match up the payments as being your salary, rather than transfers from one personal account to another which could be deemed as regular account payments.
In my scenario my employer pays into my HSBC account, the name matches what I have provided, as does the monthly amount.
Hmmm the salary going in to the account is going to be an interesting point. I have mine paid in to my NatWest Premier and then I shift it across manually to HSBC the same day.
I think it could be a matter of wait and see. Their email says they will contact us again if you don’t currently meet the criteria.
The wording in the email is ‘personal income’, not salary. So i don’t see any change in how they measure it, as long as it is money in will likely be sufficient whether it is salary, dividends, rent etc.
The actual income post tax will take into account deductions for salary sacrifice schemes (pensions, perhaps EV cars? perhaps not), and for some of us the differences in tax regimes (e.g. if you live in Scotland and hand over to the tax man a much larger chunk in tax). In a previous HSBC article, someone had posted the actual monthly income requirement based on the £75k annual threshold and it was much lower than i thought it would be – due to making allowances for deductions.
What surprised me is that HSBC don’t seem to offer a SIPP under their investment options. When i looked at the ISA option before with them i was put off as they didn’t seem to offer many fund options, especially when compared to platforms such as ii.
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