Shopify Balance and Shopify Money: Account, Card, Fees

Shopify Balance or Shopify Money: Which Account Do You Have?

Shopify's Help Center now documents this account under a new name. Your store has one business account, named either Shopify Money or Shopify Balance depending on when you opened it, and the help pages for both now sit under Shopify Money. Shopify describes where the change stands like this:

That was the state of things as of October 2026, and the Help Center gives no date for when the replacement ends. To tell which name you have, look at where you manage the account. A Shopify Balance account is managed from:

A Shopify Money account has its own section in the admin instead:

On a phone, the Shopify Money app works with your business account whether it's named Shopify Money or Shopify Balance. The app isn't compatible with tablets.

What's Different Between a Balance and a Money Account

For most of what this guide covers, the name changes nothing. Shopify's page on the account's features puts the rule in one line:

The exceptions follow from one sentence on Shopify's comparison page: if your account is named Shopify Money, only the store owner can access it, so staff cards, secondary cardholders and staff permissions to view the account aren't available. The table lists every difference we found, alongside the features that work the same, and links each one to the place it's answered in full.

What Shopify Balance Is, and What It Isn't

Shopify describes it as a free business account that you can use to deposit your store's payments and manage your cash flow from one place. There are no monthly fees, and you don't need to keep a minimum balance.

What it isn't is a bank. A note on most pages of the Help Center section says it plainly, Shopify is a tech company, not a bank, and Shopify's Balance product page goes a step further: Shopify Balance is not a bank account but a financial account optimized for commerce businesses. The banking sits with partners:

Shopify's product page says all funds in a Balance account are eligible for pass-through FDIC insurance up to $250,000 through Fifth Third Bank, if the deposits meet certain requirements. The Help Center sets the scope of that limit: the FDIC insurance applies up to $250,000 USD per depositor, per financial institution, for deposits held in the same ownership category, and the deposits in all your accounts are held at Fifth Third.

Neither Shopify nor Stripe is an FDIC-insured institution, and the insurance protects only against the failure of an insured bank. Shopify Credit and Shopify Capital are separate financial products; this guide covers the account and its cash card.

Is Shopify Balance Worth It Instead of a Bank Account?

Shopify sets up the comparison itself. Its Balance product page compares the account with traditional business bank accounts on five points, and a footnote says the bank figures come from publicly available data on select business bank accounts of the top three largest US banks by assets. The right-hand column is Shopify's description of those banks, not our measurement:

The payout row is the product page's most optimistic line: its own footnote says that on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans payouts arrive within 5 business days, with most merchants receiving them in 1–3, and the page lists next-business-day payouts by default among its Plus features. The section on the payout account below gives the Help Center's own wording on payout timing for new merchants.

The Earnings Rate Is a Reward, Not Interest

Merchants on the Basic, Grow or Advanced plans earn 2.52% and merchants on the Plus plan earn 3.54%, according to Shopify's Balance product page as of October 29, 2026, which describes the rate as variable and subject to change without notice.

The Help Center is explicit about what kind of money this is: the earnings rate is a reward, not interest, and it's paid to your account monthly, on the 5th of the following month. Plan around it as a variable bonus, not as a rate you can count on.

When to Keep a Bank Account Alongside It

The comparison above covers what Shopify chose to compare. These are the cases where a bank account still does a job this account doesn't:

• You receive wire transfers. None of the Shopify Money or Balance pages we read describes receiving an incoming wire; the documented ways in include payouts, bank transfers using your account details, transfers from a connected bank, cash and checks.
• You rely on overdraft. No page we read describes an overdraft on the account; the only overdraft the fees page mentions is one at your external bank.
• You want the account to build credit history. Applying doesn't impact your credit score, but no page we read describes how the account or card affects your credit history after that.
• You need to mail checks. No Shopify Money or Balance page we read describes the account writing paper checks itself; Bill Pay can send a vendor a paper check, paid from the account.
• Your account is named Shopify Money and you need QuickBooks Online or staff cards. Connecting to QuickBooks Online isn't available with a Shopify Money account, and neither are staff cards.

Who Can Open One, and How

Getting the account and being able to spend from it are two separate checks, and they come in this order.

Getting the account. Only the store owner can open one. Shopify's eligibility page asks for a physical residential address in the United States or Puerto Rico, a valid SSN or ITIN, and two-step authentication on your Shopify account.

The account also depends on Shopify Payments: if you deactivate Payments, you must close the account. The full checklist, and what to do if one item rules you out, is in our answer on who can open a Shopify Balance account.

Outside the US the answer is no for now: Shopify Money is available to eligible businesses in the United States, and none of the pages we read describes a version for the UK, Canada or any other country (see What we looked for and did not find, above).

Spending from the account. Approval isn't the last step. Your cash cards don't work until you verify your identity, and on a Money account, Shopify Money on desktop shows a Verify your account card when that step is waiting. Until you complete it, the cards stay unusable, so finish it before you plan to pay for anything with them.

How the account opens depends on where you are with Shopify Payments:

• Activating Shopify Payments for the first time: if you're eligible, you receive the account automatically when you activate Payments. If your admin then shows a Money section, the account you received is Shopify Money. As of October 2026 Money is gradually replacing Balance, so a store opening its account now may get Money, which has no staff cards and no QuickBooks Online sync.
• Already on Shopify Payments: open the account from the Finance section of your admin and accept its account and card agreements; Shopify's setup page still calls it a Shopify Balance account. Opening the account can take up to a few days.

Applying doesn't impact your credit score. What the account or card does to your credit history afterwards is a separate question, covered in the section on keeping a bank.

How Money Gets Into the Account

The account is built around Shopify Payments payouts; the other routes let you fund it from elsewhere, and they differ mostly in how long the money takes to become available.

Should the Account Be Your Payout Account?

Signing up already decides this for you: after you sign up, your main account is automatically set as your Shopify Payments payout account. The reason to keep it that way is speed. Payouts from Shopify Payments can arrive in the account in as little as 1 business day from the transaction processing date, though in some cases payouts for new merchants can take up to 5 business days, and Shopify says the main account lets you receive sales money up to 7 days earlier than a bank.

How that speed fits with your settlement period and payout schedule is covered in our guide to how Shopify pays you.

Payouts sent to a third-party bank account instead can take up to a week longer, depending on the regional delay period. For a Balance account, Shopify's payout page adds that you can change the payout account at any time in Shopify Balance on desktop, that changing doesn't close the account or deactivate its cards, and that switching back doesn't trigger the payout pause that can apply when you move to an external bank. Three things are tied to the choice:

• Auto-transfer rules. For a Balance account, if you move your payout account away from the main account, your active rules are canceled.
• Shopify Capital. While the account is your payout account, any Capital remittances or repayments are also withdrawn from it.
• One store only. A Balance account can serve as the payout account only for the store it's directly associated with; if you operate multiple stores, each store needs its own Balance account.

If your account details change, our answer on whether to update Shopify Payments when your Shopify Balance details change covers what to update and what to leave alone.

Finding Your Routing and Account Numbers

Your account details show your account number, routing number and monthly statements, and let you export your transactions, but the account and routing numbers sit in a different place for each name: on desktop, a Money account shows them under Wallet when you select the account, a Balance account under Manage › Account settings › Show numbers, and the app under Account details.

Additional Accounts, Auto-Transfers and Tax Set-Aside

You can have up to 6 free accounts, including your main account and up to 5 additional accounts. Only the main account can have a physical card; each additional account can have one virtual card, and cashback is earned on the main account only. Closing an additional account is permanent, as the closing section below explains.

Auto-transfer rules move part of every payout into those accounts for you. The light version:

• You set up and manage auto-transfer rules only on desktop.
• Rules are a percentage of each Shopify Payments payout; fixed-dollar amounts and time-based schedules aren't supported.
• Transfers into your other accounts are instant; transfers to an external bank go by ACH and can take 1–3 business days, depending on the receiving bank.
• Up to 5 of your Shopify Money or Balance accounts can be destinations, and there's no limit on connected external bank accounts.
• The rules work only while the main account is your Shopify Payments payout account.

Our answer on how Shopify Balance auto-transfer rules work walks through setting them up and what switches them off.

Shopify's product page lists automatic sales tax set-aside among the account's features, and the Help Center adds the boundary that matters: setting aside sales tax doesn't file taxes for you. Filing stays your job.

The Card: Virtual, Physical, ATM and Limits

The card's name follows the account's. On a Money account it's the Shopify Money Visa Cash Card, which you can use for business expenses online and in person, and with the physical card at ATMs; on a Balance account it's the Shopify Balance Visa Commercial card, powered by Stripe and issued by Celtic Bank. What Shopify calls it and whether it counts as a debit card are covered in our answer on whether Shopify has a business debit card.

Treat it as a business tool only. Shopify's eligibility page calls it a commercial card for business purposes and warns that any use for personal, family or household purposes can result in the immediate termination of the account.

None of the pages we read names an ATM network the card belongs to (see What we looked for and did not find, above), so check the ATM operator's fee before you withdraw.

Cashback and Paying Your Shopify Bill

Shopify pays 2% cashback on eligible purchases when you pay your Shopify bill with the card, and 1% on eligible advertising payments made directly from the account, on up to $100,000 USD in ad spend a year. The eligible bill purchases include shipping labels, Shopify Messaging, apps, custom domains and themes, and Shopify's cashback page lists ad campaigns with Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok paid with the card at 2% and Snapchat campaigns at 10%; the $2,000 USD yearly maximum covers cashback on all eligible card purchases. Cashback is earned on the main account, and the 1% on direct ad payments has eligibility rules of its own: it is paid even when you don't use your card, but only to accounts that meet a Shopify Credit spending or Shopify Capital funding threshold.

For cashback on card purchases, including the 2% on eligible Shopify bill purchases, the condition is the payment method: to be eligible, a Shopify Money or Shopify Balance card must be set as your primary payment method card. For new Shopify Balance users, the account is set as the default payment method for Shopify billing automatically, and you can change it at any time. On a Money account, you make the cash card primary from your billing profile under Settings › Billing.

Two billing details catch people out. If you cancel and replace a Balance card, your billing profile isn't updated with the new card details on its own. And a Balance card can't serve as your backup billing method when it is the only other payment method on file.

Which purchases count, and how the $2,000 cap works across the year, is in our answer on whether the Shopify Balance card earns cashback.

How Money Gets Out: Your Bank, Bill Pay and Abroad

Behind those three routes sit two mechanisms. Transfers and wires go out from the account itself. Shopify Bill Pay is a separate app in the Finance section of your admin, and the account is one of the ways it can pay a bill.

Transfers to Your Bank and to Recipients

The Help Center's transfers page puts transfers to a connected bank account at up to 3 business days. Sending to someone else follows the recipient rules in the table:

A daily limit applies to money you transfer from the account to a bank account. The Help Center says it is set automatically from your business's history with Shopify and might adjust up or down over time; Shopify's Balance product page describes daily transfer limits customized to your business, up to $500,000. The two don't conflict: one describes how your limit is set, the other the most it can be.

Once sent, some transfers can't be called back. Transfers over the RTP network can't be canceled, and international transfers can be canceled only for a short time after you send them. A transfer from a connected bank into the account can be canceled only while it's still processing.

Our answer on how long a Shopify Balance transfer to your bank takes goes through the timing case by case.

Paying Suppliers With Bill Pay

Shopify Bill Pay is an app that you use to manage your financial transactions through the Finance section of your Shopify admin. It's available only to US stores and runs on Melio; if you don't see the option to install it, your store isn't eligible. For domestic payments you can pay any bill using a bank transfer, a business credit or debit card, or your Shopify Balance account, and two-step authentication is required to use the app.

Timing is set by a daily run: payments are processed only once each day before 9:00 pm ET for standard delivery methods such as ACH bank transfer and paper check. Same-day delivery isn't available for every transfer; our answer on paying suppliers the same day from Shopify Balance covers when it applies and what it costs.

Shopify's own 52-second overview from 2023 shows how Bill Pay pays vendors by card or ACH. Its description names card and ACH payments and doesn't mention Balance; the Balance link comes from the Help Center sentence above, not from the video.

Paying Someone Abroad: Two Routes, One Conflict

The direct route is recent. Shopify's changelog announced on October 6, 2026 that international payments from Balance let eligible merchants pay recipients internationally from the Balance mobile app (the Shopify Money app), and the Help Center now describes sending money from the account to a recipient's bank account in another country, to pay suppliers, contractors and other businesses outside the United States. The conditions:

• Who: your business must be based in the United States, and not every account has the feature yet. If you don't have the option to add an international recipient, your account isn't eligible yet.
• Where: recipients' bank accounts in 13 countries as of October 31, 2026: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, in the recipient's local currency or in USD.
• How long: an estimated 1–3 business days.
• What it costs: each USD transfer by SWIFT has an international transfer fee of $10 USD, with no exchange rate or exchange fee; local-currency transfers carry their own per-country fees and an exchange rate.
• Limits: international transfers count toward the same daily transfer limit as transfers to US recipients.
• On a Balance account: you can send money internationally only from the Shopify Money app.

Bill Pay is the second route, and here Shopify's pages disagree on one question: can a Shopify Balance account pay an international bill? Bill Pay's main help page, read October 31, 2026, says yes: for international payments you can pay bills in USD using a bank account or your Shopify Balance account, and the vendor is paid through a wire transfer. Its page on paying bills, read the same day, says it's not possible to pay international bills using Shopify Balance, and that you must pay them using a bank transfer or a Mastercard credit card.

While the two pages disagree, don't plan around Balance funding a Bill Pay wire. Use the international transfer above, which the Help Center documents directly, or pay the international bill by bank transfer or Mastercard credit card, the two methods the paying-bills page names. Our answer on paying international suppliers from Shopify Balance tracks both routes.

Two more points apply only to Bill Pay, not to the transfer route. Businesses based in Texas or Vermont can't make international bill payments. The same pair of pages also disagrees on currency: the page on adding bills says all bill payments must be made in USD, while the paying-bills page lists foreign currency payments in 14 currencies as of October 31, 2026. For a payment in the supplier's own currency, the transfer route's local-currency option avoids that conflict for the 13 countries it covers.

Who Else Can Use the Account

This is where the two names differ most. If your account is named Shopify Money, only the store owner can access it, so staff cards, secondary cardholders and the permissions to view Balance and Shopify Credit account activity aren't available. On a Balance account, four things are open to you:

• Staff cards: you can give cards to your staff so that they can pay for business expenses.
• Spend controls: the primary cardholder sets them for each card, such as a monthly spending limit or an automatic lock date. Shopify released automatic locking of staff Balance cards on a specific date in February 2026.
• Offboarding: if you deactivate the staff account of a cardholder with active cards, that person's cards are locked automatically and can't be used.
• Viewing without a card: the View Balance account activity permission lets users view Shopify Balance transactions and the amount available to spend. You grant it in a role's Finance group, under Settings › Users › Roles.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Settings
2. Users
3. Roles
4. Bookkeeper

Zoom

Under either name, some things stay with the owner. Only the account owner can view monthly statements, and each statement covers a single account. Only the store owner can unlock a locked card, and a card transaction can be disputed only within 110 days.

Who gets a card and how to set its limits is covered in our answer on giving employees a Shopify Balance card.

After You Open It: Setup Checklist

The order matters: the cards don't work before verification, and auto-transfer rules need the main account as your payout account. Steps 5 and 7 differ by name: on a Money account, you make the cash card primary from your billing profile to pay your Shopify bill with it, and you skip staff cards.

Closing the Account, Transferring or Deactivating the Store

The outcome depends on what changes:

The Bottom Line

Shopify Balance and Shopify Money are one free US business account under two names, built around Shopify Payments payouts. Its strengths are speed and the absence of monthly fees; its limits are mostly the jobs a bank does that none of the pages we read describes.

Frequently Asked Questions