Back in March, we covered how Section 1033’s April 2026 deadline collapsed into legal limbo. Banks sued, the CFPB stopped defending its own rule, and the API-based open banking future got shelved indefinitely. Now there’s a sequel, and it’s not the comeback anyone budgeting-app-side was hoping for. On August 6, 2026, the CFPB sent a revised NPRM (officially the Personal Financial Data Rights Reconsideration) to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review. The actual text hasn’t been made public, but the fight everyone’s watching is over one of the original rule’s core protections: whether banks get to charge data aggregators like Plaid for consumer-authorized data access, instead of being banned from charging at all the way the 2024 rule required.

This isn’t a theoretical fee. It’s already happening. JPMorgan Chase and Plaid quietly signed a paid data-transfer agreement in September 2025, nearly a year before any CFPB rule changed. If you use Monarch, YNAB, Rocket Money, or Copilot, that deal is the preview. Here’s what actually changed, what we still don’t know, and what it could mean for what you pay.

Quick Verdict

What happened	CFPB submitted a revised Section 1033 NPRM to OIRA for review on August 6, 2026
What the 2024 rule said	Banks and data providers generally couldn’t charge fees for consumer-authorized data access
What the rewrite proposes	Reopens the question: banks could be allowed to charge “reasonable” fees to aggregators
Already happening	JPMorgan Chase and Plaid signed a paid data-access agreement in September 2025
Exact fee structure	Not yet public. OIRA review typically runs up to 90 days before Federal Register publication
Who pays first	Aggregators like Plaid, not you directly (though costs can flow downstream)
What to do now	Nothing urgent. Watch for the Federal Register publication and check your app’s pricing page after

What the CFPB Actually Sent to OIRA

Getting the sequencing right matters here, because it’s easy to conflate three different documents. In October 2024, the CFPB finalized the original Personal Financial Data Rights rule, which set April 1, 2026 as the big-bank compliance deadline and banned data providers from charging fees for required access. That’s the rule we covered going into limbo in March. Then, in August 2025, after a federal court stayed the original rule following the banking industry’s lawsuit, the CFPB opened an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking asking for public input on four issues, including, explicitly, “the optimal approach to the assessment of fees to defray the costs incurred by a covered person in responding to a customer.” Comments closed October 21, 2025.

The August 6, 2026 submission is the next step: an actual proposed rule, built from that comment period, now sitting with OIRA for the standard executive review before it can be published in the Federal Register. According to Consumer Finance Monitor’s coverage of the filing, the substance of the proposal (the actual fee schedule, if there is one) hasn’t been made public yet. OIRA reviews can run up to 90 days, so realistically we’re looking at a Federal Register publication sometime in the fall, followed by another public comment window before anything is final.

Here’s the honest state of play: nobody outside the CFPB and OIRA has seen the actual text, and the agency hasn’t confirmed the fee ban is gone. What we have instead is the ANPR that fed this NPRM, which explicitly asked the public whether banks and other data providers should be allowed to charge third parties for access to consumer-authorized data, plus reporting since the OIRA filing. American Banker’s rundown of what’s known about the forthcoming rule describes the new proposal as expected to let banks charge fintechs for that access, a reversal from the 2024 ban, but that’s informed speculation built on the questions the CFPB itself raised, not a leaked copy of the rule. The precise mechanics (what counts as “reasonable,” whether there’s a free tier before charges kick in, how caps on high-frequency queries would work) are locked inside an OIRA review most of us can’t see into yet. Anyone telling you the exact fee schedule right now is guessing.

The 2024 Rule Banned Fees. This One Might Not.

Worth sitting with why this reversal matters beyond the legal mechanics. The original rule’s fee ban wasn’t a footnote: it was one of the load-bearing walls of the whole “open banking” pitch. The theory was straightforward: your transaction data belongs to you, Section 1033 of Dodd-Frank gives you the right to share it with whoever you authorize, and a bank shouldn’t get to toll-gate a right that’s already yours. Free access wasn’t generosity. It was the point.

Banks pushed back hard on that framing well before the lawsuit that stalled the original rule. Their argument, consistently: building and maintaining secure data APIs costs real money (infrastructure, security monitoring, fraud controls), and aggregators making tens of thousands of calls per user per month for commercial products (income verification sold to lenders, for instance) are a different animal than a single consumer checking their own balance. Under the 2024 rule, banks had to eat that cost regardless of scale or purpose. If the 2026 rewrite follows the direction its own ANPR laid out, and reporting on the OIRA filing suggests it does, it lands on a middle path: still free for individual consumers checking their own accounts, potentially not free for the aggregation layer doing millions of pulls a day to power commercial products.

That’s a defensible policy compromise on paper. It’s also exactly the kind of “reasonable fee” language that tends to expand once it’s written into a rule, because “reasonable” gets defined by whoever holds the stronger hand at the negotiating table, and right now that’s the banks.

This Isn’t Hypothetical. It Already Happened.

Here’s the part that should change how you read this story. While the CFPB spent the past year running an ANPR and building an NPRM, JPMorgan Chase didn’t wait. In September 2025, JPMorgan and Plaid announced a renewed data-access agreement with a new pricing structure attached: Plaid now pays Chase to access customer data on behalf of its roughly 7,000 client apps, extending a relationship the two companies have had since 2018. Chase had signaled the shift back in July 2025 and began implementing fees that September, ahead of any finalized federal rule requiring or even permitting it.

The specifics are murky by design. Neither company disclosed exact pricing; people familiar with the deal described the fees to Bloomberg as “fractions of a cent per data pull,” which sounds trivial until you multiply it across every balance check and transaction sync every Monarch, YNAB, and Rocket Money user with a Chase account triggers, every day, forever. Plaid has said publicly that this specific agreement won’t change what it charges its own client apps, for now. That’s a real distinction worth holding onto: Plaid absorbing the cost today isn’t the same as Plaid absorbing it forever, especially once other large banks (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, none of which have confirmed similar deals yet) start asking for the same arrangement Chase already got.

We wrote about Plaid’s $8 billion valuation back in February and what it means for the infrastructure sitting underneath most of the apps reviewed on this site. A well-funded Plaid absorbing new bank fees quietly is a very different story than a Plaid passing those fees straight through. And a formal CFPB rule that makes fees the norm, rather than one bank’s side deal, is what tips the incentive toward the second version.

Plaid Calls It a Toll

Plaid isn’t staying quiet about any of this. In its submission on the CFPB’s ANPR, the company argued the fee question shouldn’t even be open for debate, calling the statutory language in Dodd-Frank Section 1033 (data providers “shall make available … upon request”) unconditional. Plaid’s exact position: “Congress never intended for consumers to have to pay a toll for their data under Section 1033.” The company points out that Congress explicitly wrote fee allowances into other parts of Dodd-Frank when it wanted them there, and left them out of 1033, which Plaid reads as deliberate, not an oversight the CFPB should now paper over with a “reasonable fee” carve-out.

That’s obviously self-interested — Plaid would rather not pay Chase, or anyone else, for data it’s been pulling for free for a decade. But the underlying argument is worth taking seriously on its own: if your bank can charge a toll for handing over data you already have a legal right to access, the practical value of that “right” depends entirely on what the toll costs and who ends up paying it.

How Would Bank Data Fees Reach Your Budgeting App?

If banks start charging aggregators, the cost doesn’t teleport into your subscription overnight. It moves through a few predictable steps:

1. A bank sets a per-request or subscription-style fee for aggregators pulling account data, the Chase-Plaid model, potentially formalized and expanded once the CFPB rule takes effect.
2. The aggregator (Plaid, MX, Finicity) absorbs the cost initially, usually to avoid spooking client apps mid-contract, the way Plaid says it’s doing with the Chase deal right now.
3. The aggregator renegotiates its own pricing with client apps (Monarch, YNAB, Rocket Money, Copilot) at the next contract cycle, once enough banks are charging enough fees that absorbing them stops making financial sense.
4. The budgeting app either eats the increase or raises subscription prices, the same decision every company faces when a core input cost rises.
5. You see it as a price hike on renewal, framed as a “plan update” rather than “our data pipeline got more expensive,” because that’s how subscription pricing changes get communicated.

Every step in that chain is plausible and none of it is guaranteed. The gap between “banks can charge fees” and “your YNAB renewal jumps $20” is wide, and it’s full of contract negotiations happening well out of public view.

What This Means for Monarch, YNAB, Rocket Money, and Copilot

None of these apps have announced price changes tied to Section 1033, and there’s no evidence any increase is imminent. But the cost structure underneath them is the same one Chase just changed for Plaid, so it’s worth knowing where each one stands.

Monarch and Copilot both route most of their bank connections through Plaid: Monarch Core runs $99.99/year, Copilot $95/year. Rocket Money splits its connections between Plaid and MX Technologies, at $6–$12/month depending on what you choose to pay. YNAB, at $109/year, also relies on Plaid but has one structural advantage the others don’t lean on as hard: manual transaction entry has always been a first-class option there, not an afterthought, which means a YNAB user isn’t fully hostage to aggregator pricing the way someone relying entirely on auto-sync is.

If aggregator costs do rise industry-wide, the apps with thinner margins and heavier reliance on high-frequency syncing (frequent balance refreshes, real-time alerts) are the ones with the most cost pressure to pass along. The apps that already support manual entry as a real fallback, not just a compliance checkbox, give you an actual lever if pricing does move.

What You Can Do Right Now

Honestly — not much, and that’s fine. This is a “watch it, don’t panic about it” situation.

• Don’t expect a price change tomorrow. The NPRM hasn’t even been published for public comment yet. Any pricing response from budgeting apps would come after a final rule and after aggregator contract renegotiations, which is a multi-month-to-multi-year runway.
• Watch for the Federal Register publication. Once OIRA clears the proposal, there will be another public comment period before anything is final. That’s the moment the actual fee structure (thresholds, caps, everything currently opaque) becomes public.
• Know which aggregator your app uses, and whether your specific bank has already cut a paid deal. Chase-Plaid is confirmed. Others haven’t been, as of this writing.
• Keep manual entry in your back pocket. If you use YNAB or any app with a real manual-entry option, know how to fall back to it. It’s more work, but it makes you immune to a pricing shock tied to sync frequency.
• Read renewal emails past the headline price. If your app does raise prices next year, the “why” section (if there is one) is where you’d see aggregator or data-cost language show up first.

The Bottom Line

The CFPB isn’t just delaying open banking anymore — its own ANPR put one of the original rule’s central consumer protections up for debate, and the reporting since the OIRA filing points toward banks being allowed to charge for data access that used to be free by law. That’s the expected direction, not a confirmed outcome; the CFPB hasn’t released the text. We won’t know the real shape of it (thresholds, caps, who actually qualifies for free access) until the proposal clears OIRA review and hits the Federal Register, likely later this fall. But JPMorgan Chase and Plaid already proved the fee model works in practice, months before any rule required it. That’s the real headline here: this isn’t a hypothetical regulatory fight anymore. It’s a preview, running live on one of the country’s largest banks, of what your budgeting app’s cost structure could look like everywhere else.

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Regulatory details reflect the CFPB’s August 6, 2026 OIRA submission and public reporting as of this writing. The proposal’s specific fee provisions are not yet public. Verify current pricing directly with your budgeting app before assuming any change has taken effect.