Stoozing in 2026: Why UK Savers Are Quietly Using 0% Credit Cards to Earn 4.5% Interest

You've probably never heard the word stoozing. Most people haven't. But there are roughly 200,000 UK savers quietly doing it right now, and the maths in 2026 are the friendliest they've been in fifteen years.

The idea is simple. You take out a 0% purchase credit card with a long interest-free period — currently up to 22 months at Barclaycard and M&S Bank. You put your everyday spending on it. You then take the money you would have spent and shove it into a high-rate easy-access savings account paying 4.5% or so. At the end of the 0% period, you clear the card balance with the savings cash and walk away with the interest you've earned. That interest is the stooz.

The maths in 2026

Let's run some real numbers. Suppose your household spends £1,500 a month on the kind of things a credit card will accept — food shop, petrol, energy bills paid via Direct Debit-friendly providers, train tickets, school stuff. Over a 22-month 0% window, that's £33,000 cycling through the card. You can't keep all of that in savings — you have to make minimum monthly payments — but with a slow drip-feed and careful planning you can typically keep an average balance of around £8,000–£10,000 sitting in your savings account, earning interest, rather than leaving your current account.

At a sustained 4.5% AER on a Chase or Trading 212 cash account, that's roughly £370 to £450 of interest over the period. Tax-free if you stay under your Personal Savings Allowance — and most basic-rate taxpayers do, because you have £1,000 a year before HMRC takes a slice.

That's not life-changing money. But it's a few hundred pounds for ten minutes of paperwork once a year, and the only thing you've changed is which account your money is sitting in. The Bank of England base rate is 4.25% as of April 2026, and the gap between 0% borrowing and 4.5% saving is the widest it's been since 2008. Stoozers love a high base rate.

Where the wheels can fall off

And here's the catch most articles skip. Stoozing only works if you actually pay the minimum every month, on time, every time. Miss a payment by a single day and your 0% promotional rate often dies on the spot — replaced with a 24.9%+ purchase APR that wipes out a year of stoozing in three months. Set up a Direct Debit for the full statement amount or, at minimum, the contractual minimum payment. Don't trust yourself to remember.

The other failure mode is balance transfers versus purchase 0%. Stoozing works with purchase 0% cards — where new spending gets the interest-free deal. Balance transfer 0% cards charge a fee (typically 2.5–3.5% of the transferred balance) which usually wipes out the savings interest entirely. Don't confuse the two. Read the product summary before you apply.

What counts as eligible spending

Most credit cards let you spend on almost anything except cash withdrawals (which trigger a fee and immediate interest), gambling, money transfers and stamp duty payments to HMRC. Direct Debit utility bills usually can't go on a credit card directly — but you can pay them via services like Curve or Yonder, which charge a small fee, or by routing them through a payment platform. Those workarounds add complexity. The cleanest stooz is groceries, petrol, takeaway, restaurants, train tickets, online shopping and the occasional larger purchase.

Which cards work in May 2026

The current best buys for purchase 0% in the UK as of late April 2026:

• Barclaycard Platinum Purchase: 22 months at 0%, then 24.9% APR
• M&S Bank Shopping Plus: 22 months at 0%, plus 1 M&S point per £1 spent
• Tesco Bank Clubcard Plus: 19 months at 0%, with Clubcard points
• NatWest Reward Credit Card: 18 months at 0%, plus £80 Welcome cashback if you spend £1,000 in three months

The acceptance rates have tightened compared to 2024. With the Bank of England's stricter affordability checks coming through Open Banking, expect a hard credit search and an income verification. Apply when your credit score is at its peak — meaning after a recent payslip, with no other applications in the previous 90 days.

The savings side

This is where stoozing in 2026 has changed. The easy-access savings rate ladder, ranked by AER as of late April:

• Trading 212 Cash ISA: 4.6% (variable, FSCS protected up to £85,000)
• Chase UK saver: 4.5% on the linked account, no fixed term
• Cynergy Bank Online Easy Access: 4.45%
• Tandem Easy Access: 4.4% with no notice

For stoozing, an ISA wrapper is irrelevant — your stooz interest counts toward your Personal Savings Allowance, not your ISA limit. Most stoozers go non-ISA easy-access for simplicity. If you're a higher-rate taxpayer with allowance pressure, a fixed-term cash ISA at 4.7% might just edge ahead. But the FSCS limit applies per banking licence, not per account, so split anything above £85,000 across providers.

The HMRC question

And yes, it is legal. HMRC treats stooz interest exactly like any other savings interest — taxable above your Personal Savings Allowance (£1,000 for basic-rate, £500 for higher-rate, zero for additional-rate). Banks and building societies report interest payments to HMRC automatically via the BSA scheme. There's no flag, no audit trigger, no special form. It's just savings interest, earned with someone else's money.

The credit card spending itself isn't taxed. Cashback rewards from the M&S or NatWest cards are also untaxed in HMRC's eyes — they treat them as discounts, not income.

Who shouldn't bother

Three groups should give stoozing a wide miss. First: anyone who has ever carried a credit card balance month-to-month. The discipline required is uncompromising. One slip and the strategy reverses on you fast. Second: anyone with a mortgage application coming up in the next 12–18 months. A new credit account drops your average account age, which can knock 20–40 points off your credit score temporarily, and lenders increasingly view multiple recent applications as a risk signal. Third: anyone whose Personal Savings Allowance is already saturated. If you're a higher-rate taxpayer earning £500+ in savings interest already, the stooz adds tax friction that erodes most of the gain.

For everyone else — the bulk of basic-rate UK savers with under £1,000 in annual savings interest — stoozing in 2026 is one of the cleanest small-money wins on the table. Set up the card, point your spending at it, point an equal amount at savings, and forget about it for 22 months. The card statements arrive, the savings account ticks up, and at the end of the window you flatten the card balance with the savings pot. Net gain: a couple of hundred quid for a few hours of admin.

The Bank of England has signalled at least one base rate cut in the back half of 2026. Stoozing margins will narrow as savings rates drop. The 4.5% world is unlikely to last past the autumn. If you've been thinking about it, this quarter is probably your window.