8 Bank Practices That Turn One Overdraft Into Multiple Fees. Ohioans, Beware

One overdrawn day at some Ohio banks can cost $105 before your account ever goes positive again.

That’s not from one overdraft fee.

It’s from three, each charged separately for a single rough afternoon of spending.

These are the bank and credit union practices that turn one overdraft into a stack of fees. Several of the banks and credit unions behind them operate branches across Ohio.

Note: This is general information, not financial advice. Overdraft fees, balance buffers, and daily fee caps vary by bank and credit union and are subject to change.

1. Reordering Transactions by Size

Ohio banks and credit unions don’t have to process a day’s charges in the order they happened.

Many process the biggest transaction first and work down to the smallest, a posting order the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s 2013 overdraft study found pushes more individual purchases into the negative than smallest-first processing would.

Line up a $600 rent check, a $40 grocery run, and a $6 coffee against a $500 balance, and largest-to-smallest processing can push all three into the negative instead of just the coffee.

Three fees, not one.

Ohio credit unions disclose this in writing to new members: The order in which transactions post can change how many of them end up costing a fee.

2. Charging a Fee for Each Item

Fifth Third Bank, headquartered in Cincinnati, charges $35 per item that overdraws an account, not one flat fee for the day.

Cross the line three separate times before the bank closes its books for the day, and the tab hits $105.

KeyBank, based in Cleveland, runs the same math on a smaller scale: $20 per item, up to three items a day, for a $60 ceiling.

Same idea, smaller numbers.

One shortfall can trigger multiple separate charges long before the day is over.

The daily maximum sounds like a protection.

It also works as an admission: A single overdrawn day can generate more than one fee.

3. Adding a Sustained Overdraft Fee

KeyBank, an Ohio bank, doesn’t stop at the per-item charge.

If an account stays overdrawn by more than $20 for five straight business days, KeyBank’s own fee schedule adds another $20 charge, on top of whatever per-item fees already hit.

One shortfall, two bills.

A slow week to catch up turns one overdraft into two separate fees stacked days apart, and the clock resets every five business days the balance stays negative.

Miss a paycheck by a few days, and the sustained fee alone can outlast the mistake that caused it.

4. Freezing Money With Authorization Holds

An Ohio bank’s own debit network can freeze $1 to $100 on a card the moment a driver taps a gas pump, long before the final sale amount is known.

That single freeze can push the available balance negative on its own.

The same shortfall can then draw more than one fee.

The available balance can show enough to cover a purchase at checkout, then a per-item fee lands anyway once the hold settles.

When a hold clears slowly, the account can stay negative long enough for a bank’s sustained-overdraft charge to hit the identical shortfall days later.

A $60 gas station hold that takes two days to clear can turn one negative balance into a per-item fee at the register and a sustained fee by week’s end, without a single new purchase.

Why an Ohio Bank’s App Balance and Available Balance Differ

An Ohio bank’s mobile app balance isn’t the number that decides whether the next purchase overdraws the account.

The available balance is: It nets out every pending authorization hold system-wide, so a hotel deposit or a rental-car hold can shrink it just as fast as a gas pump can.

Whichever number is lower controls whether the next swipe crosses into overdraft, not the balance sitting on the home screen.

Psst! How overdraft-prone are your banking habits? Run through this checklist and see where you stand.

5. Fees on the Same Bounced Payment

Bank of America charged a $35 fee every time a merchant resubmitted an unpaid automated clearing house (ACH) payment or check, on top of the fee already charged when the payment first bounced.

Regulators caught it.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ordered Bank of America to refund approximately $80.4 million in redress after finding the bank repeated the fee on the same bill from September 2018 to February 2022.

One missed payment, resubmitted by the merchant just once, became two separate non-sufficient funds (NSF) fees for the identical bill.

Bank of America stopped the practice years ago, but the federal government stopped discouraging it: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) rescinded its guidance against multiple re-presentment fees in April 2026, leaving that same fee stacking legal industry-wide again.

6. Skipping a Cushion for Small Shortfalls

Huntington Bank, headquartered in Columbus, waives its overdraft fee entirely if an account is negative by $50 or less.

KeyBank sets its cushion at $20.

Not every bank or credit union offers a cushion.

Small cushion, big difference.

Without that buffer, a $6 coffee, a $12 streaming renewal, and a $3 vending machine snack can each cross the line separately in the same afternoon, and each one can draw its own fee instead of the day netting out as a single, smaller dip.

A bigger cushion means fewer tiny purchases turn into paid fees.

A smaller cushion, or none, means almost anything can.

7. Charging Extra for Overdraft Protection

Fifth Third’s Essential Checking, Business Banking, and Commercial accounts carry their own $12 Overdraft Protection Transfer Fee every time a linked savings account or credit line covers a shortfall.

That charge lands separately from the bank’s standard per-item overdraft fee.

Set up overdraft protection expecting a safety net, and a day with two or three separate dips into savings can draw two or three separate $12 transfer charges instead of one.

The protection itself isn’t free everywhere.

8. Splitting Coverage Into Two Categories

7 17 Credit Union, an Ohio credit union based in Warren, splits its overdraft coverage into two separate fee categories: Courtesy Pay for checks, electronic payments, and recurring debits, and Courtesy Pay Plus for cash machine withdrawals and everyday debit card swipes.

Each one carries its own $19.95 fee per paid item.

A single rough day that includes a bounced automatic bill payment and an overdrawn debit swipe at the grocery store can pull fees from both categories at once.

Two products mean two separate fees for the same tight week.

The Rule That Never Took Effect

Congress voted to repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s $5 overdraft fee cap in the spring of 2025, a rule written for the same large banks that operate branches across Ohio, and President Trump signed the repeal before the rule ever applied to a single transaction.

The cap would have covered only banks and credit unions holding more than $10 billion in assets, roughly 175 of them nationwide.

Many of Ohio’s credit unions and community banks were never going to fall under it anyway.

Nothing changed.

The House vote that sent the repeal to the president’s desk came down to 217-211, a margin thin enough that a few flipped votes would have kept the $5 cap alive.

The country’s twenty largest consumer banks alone collected $4 billion in overdraft fee revenue in 2025, even after years of public pressure to cut the fees.

Huntington Bank, headquartered in Columbus, increased its own overdraft fee revenue 40% between 2023 and 2025.

That was the largest jump the National Consumer Law Center tracked among banks that already charged the fee before that stretch began.