Wise vs Revolut vs N26 in the Netherlands: What Each Actually Does

Three apps that get called "banks" but work quite differently once you're living in the Netherlands. A factual look at IBANs, iDEAL, direct debits, fee models, sending money home, and whose deposit-guarantee scheme is standing behind your balance.

Almost everyone who moves here ends up with at least one of these apps on their phone, usually before they own a Dutch address. They get lumped together as "the neobanks", which flattens some real differences: one of them isn't a bank at all, one is a Lithuanian bank with a Dutch branch, and one is a German bank that has never issued a Dutch IBAN. Those distinctions sound like trivia until an employer bounces your payroll form or a landlord's direct debit fails. What follows is a factual comparison, not a recommendation — nobody here is going to tell you which to pick, and the honest answer depends entirely on what you need an account to do.

One standing caveat before anything else: pricing tiers, free-withdrawal allowances, and feature availability at all three change several times a year. Every figure below is anchored to 2026, and the only authoritative source for what you'll actually pay is each provider's own current pricing page — Wise's pricing page, Revolut's plan comparison, and N26's plans page. Check them before you decide anything.

The day-one problem

The reason these apps have such a foothold among new arrivals is a scheduling conflict baked into Dutch bureaucracy. Your employer wants a bank account. The traditional banks generally want a BSN, and often want you physically present with ID. The BSN comes from your gemeente registration, which needs an address, which needs a rental contract, which increasingly needs proof of income paid into a bank account. Round and round.

There are two ways out. The first is bunq, which is worth naming because it sits in a different category from the three here: it's a Dutch-licensed bank, you can sign up remotely from abroad with just a passport, and it issues a genuine Dutch IBAN immediately. You're expected to supply your BSN and Dutch address afterwards — banks commonly reference something like a 90-day window — but it solves the day-one problem cleanly.

The second is one of the three apps in this guide, all of which will open you an account with a passport and a phone number, none of which will give you a Dutch IBAN except in one specific case. That distinction is the whole story, so it's worth understanding before you commit your salary to one. If the traditional route is what you're actually after, the mechanics are in opening a Dutch bank account; and since all three of these apps verify you by SMS, having a Dutch SIM sorted first saves a round of roaming charges.

What each one actually is

Wise is not a bank. It's an electronic money institution — in Europe, Wise Europe SA, licensed by the National Bank of Belgium — which is why its euro account details come with a Belgian (BE) IBAN. It started as a money-transfer service and the account grew out of that, which shows: the multi-currency machinery is the point, and the everyday-banking features are comparatively thin. There's no monthly plan fee on the basic account; you pay a small one-off fee for the physical card and a transparent percentage on each currency conversion.

Revolut is a bank, licensed in Lithuania as Revolut Bank UAB. It's the only one of the three that now issues NL IBANs: Revolut opened a Netherlands branch and has been migrating Dutch-resident customers onto Dutch account details, replacing their old Lithuanian (LT) ones. Migration is gradual and by invitation, with the old LT IBAN staying live for a transition period, so whether you have an NL IBAN today depends on where you are in that queue rather than on anything you can request. The business model is subscription tiers — a free Standard plan and paid plans stepping up through roughly €4, €10, €18 and a considerably pricier top tier per month as of 2026 — each unlocking bigger fee-free allowances and travel perks.

N26 is a German bank, N26 Bank SE, and issues German (DE) IBANs. There's a free Standard plan and paid tiers at roughly €4.90, €9.90 and €16.90 a month as of 2026, adding insurance, allowances, and metal cards as you climb. It's the most conventionally bank-shaped of the three — a current account with a card, savings spaces, and a clean app — and the least focused on foreign exchange.

Feature comparison

Allowances and percentages in that table are the part that moves. Treat it as a map of which questions to ask, not as a price list.

One footnote on iDEAL itself: from 2026 it's being rebranded iDEAL | Wero, the first step in a gradual migration to Wero, the European payments wallet. Nothing changes for you at checkout yet, but the name in the payment dropdown will.

The NL IBAN problem, which shouldn't exist but does

Here is the thing that catches people. Under the SEPA Regulation, any business in the euro area that accepts euro payments must accept any euro-area IBAN. A German IBAN is as valid for your Dutch salary as an ING one. Refusing it because of the country code — "IBAN discrimination" — is illegal.

It also happens constantly.

The pattern is depressingly consistent: an HR portal with a validation rule that only accepts NL-prefixed numbers, a landlord's automated rent system, a gemeente refund form, an energy supplier's direct-debit signup, a payroll provider whose software was written in 2009. Nobody involved is usually being deliberately obstructive — it's a form field, and the person on the other end has no authority to change it. Which means being right doesn't help you get paid this month.

Practical responses, roughly in order of how much energy they cost. Point out the rule politely and in writing; a surprising number of finance departments fix it once someone senior reads the words "SEPA Regulation". Ask whether a manual payment instruction can bypass the portal. Report it, since the Accept My IBAN campaign collects these cases and Dutch financial supervisors enforce the regulation. And, when the bill is due next Tuesday and none of the above will move fast enough, hold a Dutch-IBAN account alongside the app for exactly these situations, which is what a large share of people here quietly do.

Revolut's Dutch branch migration removes this problem for whoever's been moved over. It doesn't help you today if you haven't been.

Sending money home

For a lot of people this is the actual reason the app is on the phone. There is no single cheapest route, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something — it depends on the corridor, the amount, and how your recipient collects the money.

The only reliable comparison is total landed amount: what lands in the recipient's account, in their currency, after everything. Compare that, not the advertised fee.

Bank wires are the clearest illustration of why. A traditional bank transfer often looks free or nearly free upfront, then buries a 2–4% margin inside the exchange rate on top of a flat SWIFT charge of roughly €15–25. A "no fee" transfer can comfortably be the most expensive route on the table.

Wise prices off the real mid-market rate plus a published percentage, which makes the total easy to calculate in advance and tends to hold up well on larger transfers and on corridors where its rate is competitive. Revolut converts at the interbank rate within your plan's monthly allowance, with a fee above it and a surcharge at weekends, which makes it cheap for smaller amounts inside the allowance and less predictable outside it. N26 handles international transfers through a Wise partnership rather than its own rails.

Then there's the specialist tier — Remitly and similar services — which sometimes undercuts everyone with promotional zero-fee windows, and more importantly offers payout methods the others don't: cash pickup, mobile wallet delivery, direct deposit to a specific local network. For corridors like India, Turkey, Brazil, or much of Africa, how your recipient actually gets the money can matter more than the exchange rate, especially on smaller amounts where a €2 difference in fee is noise against a 1.5% rate spread.

Run the actual numbers for your specific route and amount, each time, because pricing shifts often and the cheapest service for someone's transfer to Turkey may not be cheapest for yours to Brazil.

What none of them replace

All three share the same three gaps, and they're the reason most long-term residents end up with a Dutch bank account eventually as well.

Mortgages. ABN AMRO, ING, and Rabobank are effectively your route to a Dutch mortgage, together with the specialist lenders and mortgage advisers who work with them. None of the three apps here lend against Dutch property, and a mortgage adviser will want to see a Dutch banking history.

Cash. None of them take cash deposits. If you're paid in cash, run a market stall, or simply want to put a birthday envelope from your parents into an account, you need a bank with a deposit machine — which in practice means one of the big three.

A person to talk to. There are no branches. When something goes genuinely wrong — a frozen account during a fraud review, an inheritance transfer, a dispute nobody in chat has authority to resolve — the difference between an app and a bank you can walk into becomes vivid. Account freezes during automated compliance checks are a recurring complaint across the whole neobank sector, and the resolution path is a chat queue.

There's also a quieter one: recognition. A Dutch counterparty seeing an NL IBAN from a bank they've heard of asks no questions. That's not a feature you can put in a table, but it's real.

The common setup people land on is two accounts: one of these apps for travel, currency, and day-to-day spending, and a Dutch bank account for salary, rent, and anything institutional. That's a reasonable amount of admin, not an elegant solution, but it reflects what each side is actually good at.

Whose guarantee is standing behind your money

This one is worth understanding properly, because the headline number is identical across the banks and the substance behind it is not.

N26 is a German bank, so euro deposits are covered by Germany's statutory deposit guarantee scheme up to €100,000 per person.

Revolut is a Lithuanian bank. Deposits are covered by Lithuania's national scheme, also up to €100,000. The Dutch branch and the NL IBAN don't change that — under EU rules, a branch is covered by the home country's scheme, so a Dutch-IBAN Revolut account is still protected from Vilnius, not Amsterdam.

Wise is not a bank and has no deposit guarantee scheme at all. Instead it operates under safeguarding rules: customer money is held separately from Wise's own funds, in cash at partner banks and in low-risk liquid assets such as government bonds, and it can't be used to pay Wise's debts. If Wise failed, a regulator would run an orderly process to return balances. That's a genuinely different mechanism from a state guarantee paying you within days, and the practical read is that Wise is built for money passing through rather than money sitting still.

Dutch banks sit under DNB's depositogarantiestelsel, again €100,000 per person per banking licence.

Same number, four different institutions standing behind it, and different processes if one ever fails. Whether that matters to you depends entirely on how much you keep in the account and for how long.

FAQ

Can I get paid my salary into a Revolut or N26 account? Legally yes — any euro-area IBAN must be accepted for euro payroll. In practice it depends on whether your employer's payroll system agrees, and a meaningful minority don't. Ask HR before your first payroll cut-off rather than after.

Do I need a BSN to open one of these? Not to open the account. You'll generally be asked for it once you're a Dutch resident, since the banks have tax-reporting obligations, and leaving it unanswered indefinitely can lead to restrictions. Sorting your gemeente registration and BSN early makes this and most other paperwork easier — it's near the top of the first 30 days checklist for a reason.

Which one is best? There isn't a general answer, and this guide deliberately doesn't give one. They're built for different jobs: a currency-heavy life, a subscription-perks life, a plain current account. Compare the specific features you'll actually use against each provider's own current pricing page, and note that the answer changes when their fee schedules do.

Is it a problem to have three of them? Only for your attention span. There's no Dutch credit-score system that penalises holding multiple accounts, since the Netherlands doesn't run one. The real cost is admin: three apps to keep verified, three sets of terms changing under you, and a balance you've forgotten about in one of them.