Blog · November 8, 2026
How to find recurring subscriptions in your bank statements
The fastest way to find every subscription you pay for is to take 12 months of bank statements and look for the same payee charging about the same amount every month. Doing that by hand across 12 PDFs takes an evening. Bank Statement Analysis does it in your browser: drop the PDFs and the Subscriptions found card lists each payee, the day it charges, the amount and how many of your months it appeared in. Nothing is uploaded and it is free.
What counts as a subscription
For this purpose a subscription is any charge that comes back every month without you doing anything: streaming, cloud storage, software, a gym, a news site, an app, a phone plan, insurance paid monthly. The merchant does not have to call it a subscription. What matters is the pattern: same payee, same amount give or take a few cents, about 30 days apart.
Rent, a car loan or a transfer to your own savings repeat every month too, but you know about them. The point of the exercise is the charges you did not know about or had forgotten.
Why they hide
Subscriptions are hard to spot on a statement for three reasons.
- The description changes. The same merchant appears as "STREAMCO 8827-11", "STREAMCO 8827-12" and "STREAMCO*8827-01" on three statements. Each line looks slightly different, so your eye does not group them.
- The amount is small. A $4.99 charge is easy to skip when the lines around it are $120 at the grocery store and $1,850 for rent.
- One month is one page. A statement shows a single charge. The pattern only appears when you put 12 statements next to each other, and almost nobody does.
Some banks show a "recurring payments" view, but it covers only the merchants that flag a charge as recurring, not ACH debits or a card from another bank.
How the tool detects them
After the PDFs are read, every debit is grouped by its normalised payee: the description with the reference numbers, store codes and dates stripped out, so the three "STREAMCO" lines above land in one group. A group is listed as a subscription when all of the following hold:
- the payee was charged at least three times, in three different months;
- the amounts are within 5% of the usual amount for that payee, so a $15.49 plan that became $15.99 still counts, and a one-off purchase from the same merchant does not;
- the gaps between charges are roughly a month, between about 24 and 38 days, so a weekly coffee or a twice-monthly payment is not mistaken for a subscription;
- it is not a transfer to one of your own accounts.
Each match is shown with the payee, the day of the month it usually charges, the amount, and "seen 9 of 12", meaning it appeared in nine of the twelve months you dropped. The card totals them as an amount per month. The same rows also carry a category, Subscriptions for known merchants, which you can change on any row; the change applies to every row from that payee.
Two limits. Yearly charges are not detected, because the spacing test is monthly; they are still in the table under their category. And scanned or password-protected PDFs cannot be read; the statement has to be the text PDF your bank gives you.
A realistic example
Twelve months of a checking account, fictional merchants, produce a list like this:
| Payee | Day | Amount | Seen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Northwind Fitness | 1st | $49.00 | 12 of 12 |
| Streamco | 14th | $17.99 | 12 of 12 |
| Cloudbox Storage | 3rd | $11.99 | 12 of 12 |
| Daily Ledger News | 22nd | $9.99 | 11 of 12 |
| Quill Notes App | 8th | $4.99 | 12 of 12 |
| Lumen Audiobooks | 19th | $14.95 | 7 of 12 |
That is $108.91 a month, about $1,300 a year. The two interesting lines are Lumen Audiobooks, which was started in May and never used after July, and Quill Notes, which the account holder switched away from a year ago but never cancelled. Neither would have stood out on a single statement.
What to do with the list
- Mark each line keep, cancel or check. Most people find one or two they had forgotten and one they thought they had cancelled.
- Cancel with the merchant, not the bank, where you can. A bank can block a card charge, but ACH debits and renamed merchants come back; the merchant's cancellation is the one that sticks.
- Note the charge day. A subscription that bills on the 1st, the day before payday, is a common cause of an overdraft fee. The Fees card on the same page shows whether that has happened to you.
- Check again in three months. Drop the new statements; a charge that should have stopped will still show "seen 3 of 3".
If you are preparing for a mortgage, the same run shows the lender view: the income a bank-statement lender would estimate from your deposits. Subscriptions do not change that figure, but overdraft fees caused by them appear in its flags. The figures are estimates, not a lender's decision.
Frequently asked
How does the tool decide that a payment is a subscription?
Same normalised payee, at least three charges in three different months, each within 5% of the usual amount, roughly a month apart. Transfers to your own accounts are skipped.
How many months of statements do I need?
Three at minimum; twelve is better, and up to 24 can be dropped together.
Will it find yearly subscriptions?
No, the spacing test is monthly. Yearly charges are still in the table with their category.
Can I cancel a subscription from the tool?
No. It gives you the payee, day and amount; cancelling happens with the merchant or your bank.
Is my statement uploaded to find the subscriptions?
No. Reading and detection both run in your browser. The privacy page lists the few content-free counts the site records.