Debit card or credit card: the real cost in Belgium

In Belgium the debit card takes money out of your account within one to two days; the credit card takes it at the end of an agreed period. The first comes with virtually every current account, the second costs between 0 and 66 € a year. Since Maestro disappeared, both carry the same logo.

Since 2023, the Belgian debit card has carried a credit card logo

The confusion is not the reader's fault. It has a date of birth.

On 1 July 2023 Belgian banks began replacing the Maestro function, present on some ten million debit cards, with Debit Mastercard or Visa Debit. The announced timetable ran over five years, and cards issued before July 2023 keep their Maestro function until 2027. The replacement itself cost customers nothing: the new card simply arrived in the post.

Timeline compiled from Test-Achats and RTBF, consulted on 18 September 2026.

Most banks went with Debit Mastercard. Crelan, bpost bank, banque CPH, Europabank, Keytrade, NewB and vdk chose Visa Debit instead. The result: a Belgian wallet now holds two rectangular cards stamped with the same international network, only one of which is a credit card.

The word Debit, spelled out next to the logo

The marker is five characters long. A debit card carries the word Debit next to the Visa or Mastercard logo, almost always in the bottom right corner of the front or the back. A credit card does not.

A second clue is purely Belgian: the Bancontact logo. It appears only on debit cards, never on a credit card. Bancontact is the domestic Belgian card scheme, accepted by every merchant terminal in the country.

What changes at the moment money leaves the account?

The timing of the debit, and nothing else. That is the substantive difference, and everything else follows from it.

With a debit card, the amount moves from your current account to the merchant's within one to two days, as Wikifin, the financial education site run by the FSMA, the Belgian financial markets regulator, describes it. The ceiling is your available balance plus any authorised overdraft, capped by a daily and weekly limit set by the bank.

With a credit card, nothing moves on the account at the moment of purchase. The issuer advances the money, adds up the month's transactions, and collects the total on an agreed date, most often between the 15th and the 20th of the following month. The ceiling is no longer your balance but the credit line granted, generally 1,250 € or 2,500 € for a classic Belgian card.

One detail escapes almost everybody: in Belgium every bank credit card runs on deferred debit. The French choice between immediate and deferred debit does not exist here, because deferral is the definition of the card. The Belgian trade-off sits elsewhere: pay the statement in full on the due date, or spread the repayment and pay interest.

Four fee schedules, line by line

I took the fee schedules currently in force at four Belgian banks and set the two cards side by side on identical operations. Here is the record.

Argenta: fee schedule DW 26234, valid from 16 September 2026. KBC and CBC: rates in force on 1 January 2026, announced in October 2025. ING: changes of 1 January 2026. Keytrade: fee schedule FEN/03-2026, in force since 2 March 2026.

Two lines deserve a pause, because they contradict the intuition.

The first is the 9.00 € a year for the KBC debit card. On the KBC pay-per-item current account, which rose to 3 € a month on 1 January 2026, the debit card is not included: it is billed separately at 0.75 € a month. Account plus debit card therefore comes to 45 € a year before a single transaction, where Argenta's Formule Green delivers the pair for nothing. That is a 45 € annual gap on the most ordinary building block in retail banking.

The second is the 6.00 € per cash withdrawal with a credit card, in euros, in Belgium, at the ATM round the corner. On a 200 € withdrawal that is 3 % of the amount for exactly the same banknotes the debit card hands over for free. Test-Achats puts the market range at 1 to 2 % of the amount withdrawn, with a minimum of 2.50 to 5 € depending on the issuer, and notes that the charge applies in Belgium just as it does abroad.

How much does each card cost per year?

The debit card is a false budget problem: it is included in nearly every Belgian package, and the exceptions recorded here top out at 14.52 € a year. ING did raise the price of its additional debit card from 10 € a year to 1.21 € a month on 1 January 2026, or 14.52 €, a 45 % increase that went largely unnoticed.

The credit card ranges from 0 to 66 € a year at the banks recorded here alone, and Test-Achats puts the annual fee of a basic bank credit card at around 20 € on average. Three billing models coexist in Belgium:

• Included in a package, like the KBC Compte Plus at 51 € a year, which carries both the debit card and the basic credit card.
• A paid add-on to a free account, like the Argenta Mastercard at 2.00 € a month bolted onto the Formule Green, free for 18 to 24 year olds.
• Free subject to usage, like the Keytrade Visa Classic, waived from twelve transactions a year and billed 25 € below that threshold, as our article on the Keypack sets out.

The third model is the most misleading. A card advertised as free that flips to 25 € because you only pulled it out eight times in the year is a 25 € card, and eight uses a year describes rather well the customer who keeps it just in case.

Which card should you use outside the euro area?

The credit card for payments. The debit card for withdrawals and for anything happening in euros. The calculation is done per transaction, and it is tighter than commonly claimed.

Take Argenta again, whose fee schedule of 16 September 2026 gives both grids. A payment in foreign currency costs 0.60 € plus a 2.00 % currency margin with the debit card, and a 1.60 % margin with no flat fee on the Mastercard. On a 100 € purchase that is 2.60 € against 1.60 €.

The gap is therefore 1 € per 100 € spent, or 1 % of the amount. To recoup the 24 € annual fee of the Mastercard on that line alone, you need to spend 2,400 € outside the euro area over the year, in payments averaging 100 €. Three weeks in the United States will do it; a weekend in London will not.

On withdrawals the hierarchy never flips. In euros inside the SEPA area, the Argenta debit card withdraws for free while the Mastercard charges 6.00 €. In foreign currency both take the same 6.00 € flat fee, on top of which sits a 2.00 % margin on debit and 1.60 % on credit: on 200 €, that is 10.00 € against 9.20 €. An 80 cent gap does not justify pulling out a card you pay 24 € a year for.

One last point, rarely written down and yet decisive at the first Thai ATM: Belgian debit cards are blocked outside Europe by default, and Wikifin advises asking your bank to unblock them before departure. It takes two minutes in the app. It only helps those who think of it before boarding.

A cash withdrawal with a credit card costs 6 € at Argenta, in euros, in Belgium, at the machine across the street.

The hotel deposit and the car rental counter

The argument that keeps a credit card in a Belgian wallet is not about fees. It is contractual.

A car rental company or a hotel does not want to collect the deposit: it wants to block it, that is to reserve an amount on a credit line without ever taking it, then release it when the car comes back or the guest checks out. A credit card does that natively, because the issuer advances the money. A debit card only does it by actually taking the money from your account, and only where the business accepts that.

This is why a credit card remains necessary for anyone renting a car, booking a hotel with a guarantee, or buying from an American site that does not yet recognise the Debit mark. The rest of the time, its added value is nil.

Four lines are enough to decide, and all four sit on the card's fee sheet:

• The annual fee, and the condition that brings it to zero if there is one, with the exact number of transactions required.
• The cost of a cash withdrawal, as a percentage and as a minimum amount, in Belgium and outside the euro area alike.
• The currency margin applied to payments in foreign currency, to be compared with the one on the same bank's debit card.
• The insurance actually included, and above all its ceiling: travel cancellation covered up to 6,000 € is not the same thing as uncapped medical assistance.

A Belgian credit card is legally a credit facility

The legal status comes as a surprise, and it has concrete consequences.

Under Belgian law, a credit card with staged repayment is an ouverture de crédit, a revolving credit facility, on the same footing as a cash reserve or an authorised overdraft on a current account. The SPF Économie, the federal public service for the economy, repeats this at every revision of the ceiling rates: the annual percentage rate applicable to these cards is capped by law and reviewed in March and in September against reference indices, the last adjustment for credit facilities dating from 1 December 2025.

Three consequences for the cardholder. The card application goes through a solvency check, which explains the refusals. The facility is registered with the Centrale des Crédits aux Particuliers, the individual credit register held by the National Bank of Belgium, even with not a single euro drawn. And a payment incident is recorded there as a credit default, not as a simple failed direct debit.

The debit card, by contrast, is only a payment instrument. No check, no register entry, no rate.

Two cards, two uses, only one worth paying for

The workable Belgian setup usually comes down to two cards and one rule. The debit card handles daily life, withdrawals and payments in euros, at no cost. The credit card sleeps in the wallet and only comes out for a deposit, a booking or a purchase in foreign currency, with the statement cleared every month.

To place your own bank across every line item, our ranking of Belgian banks lists the annual cost of the current account and the savings rates bank by bank, and the bank comparison tool puts two packages side by side. On the fee lines themselves, our survey of Belgian banking fees works through the calculation item by item, and the case of the Argenta Green account shows what becomes of a free account as soon as a paid card is added to it.

Sources

• Wikifin (FSMA), Differences between a debit card and a credit card: card names, one to two day transfer delay, default blocking outside Europe, liability capped at 50 € for unauthorised transactions. Page updated on 14 July 2026.
• Argenta, Fee schedule, document DW 26234: valid from 16 September 2026. Formule Green at 0 € a month, Mastercard at 2.00 € a month, Golden at 5.50 € a month, credit card cash withdrawal at 6.00 €, currency margins of 2.00 % on debit and 1.60 % on credit.
• Test-Achats, How to choose a credit card: annual fee of around 20 € for a basic bank card, withdrawals charged at 1 to 2 % with a minimum of 2.50 to 5 €, in Belgium as well as abroad. Article of 5 January 2026.
• Test-Achats, KBC raises its current account fees from 1 January 2026: pay-per-item current account at 3 € a month with the debit card billed separately at 0.75 € a month, Compte Plus at 4.25 € a month with cards included. Published on 15 October 2025.
• Test-Achats, Maestro withdrawal and replacement by Visa Debit and Debit Mastercard: migration timetable, split of banks between the two networks, free replacement.
• RTBF, Maestro cards become Mastercard debit: ten million cards affected, five-year migration from 1 July, Maestro function kept until 2027.
• SPF Économie, Further reduction of the maximum rates on consumer credit: credit cards with staged repayment are credit facilities, ceiling rates unchanged on 1 December 2025, reviewed in March and September. Press release of 27 November 2025.
• Guide-Epargne, ING will bill its card fees monthly: additional debit card raised from 10 € a year to 1.21 € a month on 1 January 2026, transfer from a credit card at 6 € plus 1 %. Published on 22 October 2025.