Birmingham has kept its place as the UK’s busiest location for current account switching, with 7,748 switches between April and June 2026, the latest Current Account Switch Service regional rankings show.
Newcastle upon Tyne, with 6,097 switches, and Manchester, with 6,020, completed the top three. It is the second quarter in a row that Birmingham has led the table.
Across the UK, more than 286,000 current account switches were completed in the second quarter. June was the busiest month, accounting for 115,421 switches, or more than 40 per cent of the quarter’s total.
Scotland moves up the table
Glasgow was Scotland’s leading switching location and ranked fourth across the UK with 6,005 switches. Edinburgh entered the UK top ten for the first time this year, with 4,978.
The rest of the top ten was made up of Sheffield (5,933), East London (5,575), Nottingham (5,339), Bristol (5,119) and South East London (5,050).
Younger switchers on the rise
People aged 25 to 40 remained the most active switchers, carrying out 121,251 switches, more than 42 per cent of the total and almost three times as many as those aged 18 to 24. The younger group is catching up, however: switches by 18 to 24 year olds reached 40,949 in the quarter, up by almost a fifth, or 18 per cent, on the first quarter of 2026.
The rise comes as earlier research from Pay.UK found that school leavers want a bank account that helps them budget and plan, with 29 per cent naming this, while 26 per cent said not knowing how to choose an account put them off switching.
John Dentry, product manager at Pay.UK, which owns and operates the Current Account Switch Service, said: “The latest Regional Rankings demonstrate the continued strength of competition within the UK’s banking sector, with hundreds of thousands of consumers taking advantage of the opportunity to move to an account that better meets their needs.”
He added that it was “particularly encouraging to see increasing numbers of young people switching bank accounts alongside the sustained popularity of switching among those aged 25 to 40”.
The service is free to use and completes a switch in seven working days, moving incoming and outgoing payments such as salaries and direct debits to the new account. Location figures are based on switchers’ postcodes, and Outer London areas with their own postcodes, such as Twickenham, Kingston and Harrow, are counted separately from London.
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