Newcastle BS unleash new best buy easy-access savings deal
Newcastle BS catapults to the top of the low-threshold savings league with a new deal that tracks base rates until the end of 2025 – and it’s open to all
- Newcastle BS’s new Base Rate Tracker pays 4.3% and offers unlimited access
- It guarantees that the interest rate will not be less than 0.7 basis points below the base rate
- Last week, the Bank of England raised key interest rates to 5%
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Newcastle Building Society has launched a best-buy easy-access savings deal that promises to follow the Bank of England’s base rate until December 31, 2025.
The Newcastle Base Rate Tracker is available today and starts at a market-leading rate of 4.3 percent.
The deal guarantees an interest rate that will fall no less than 0.7 percentage point below the Bank of England’s base rate.
Tracker rate: Newcastle BS says that when the Bank of England base rate changes, the rate on the account will change.
Last week, the Bank of England raised its key interest rate to 5 percent. It marked the bank’s 13th rate hike since December 2021, resulting in the strongest increase since 1989 – a jump of 4.9 percentage points over 18 months.
The deal is open to everyone, not just Newcastle customers.
Savers can open the new account online or in a branch with just £1 and can then deposit up to £250,000 – although savers have FSCS protection up to £85,000 per person.
Crucially, the deal is an easily accessible account without any restrictions. There is no limit to the number of deposits or withdrawals a customer can make.
Someone who puts £10,000 into this account can expect to earn £430 in interest over the course of the next 12 months.
However, the rate may change during that time as it depends on the Bank of England base rate.
Markets now expect the Bank of England to raise key rates to 5.75 percent later this year. Some traders are even betting it will be 6 percent.
If the Bank of England raises base rates to these levels, those who have Newcastle’s new tracker deal could earn more than 5 per cent on an easily accessible deal.
Newcastle BS says that when the Bank of England base rate changes, the interest on the account will not change more than five working days after the change takes effect.
The second best low-threshold savings interest is offered by the Savings and Investments app chip* and pays 4.21 percent.
The average ease of access rate for all accounts is 2.37 percent, according to data from Moneyfacts, with many of the big banks paying much less.
James Blower, founder of savings website The Savings Guru, believes savers need to act quickly or risk losing out.
He said: ‘It’s the best rate on the market right now and, given the £1 minimum balance, it’s worth securing.
Now that many economists are predicting that the base interest rate will rise to 5.5 percent in August, interest rates on it could also rise in the near future.
“Given this, I don’t see it being on sale for too long, so savers interested in it should act very quickly.”
Andrew Hagger, a personal finance expert at MoneyComms, takes a similar view.
“It seems like a no-brainer,” adds Hagger, “although the competition in the easy access space is red-hot and most of the best-buy players will raise easy access rates in line with base rate movements anyway — the account is labeled ‘issue 1’ and you wonder if it could quickly become oversubscribed in the current price battle.”