Bank fees are falling. Not equally.

Every Ghanaian bank reports two numbers to Bank of Ghana. The lending rate it advertises, and the annual percentage rate a borrower actually pays once fees are counted.

The distance between them is the fee load. We had four of these reports when this was written, spanning twenty months (Cedafin now holds six, from September 2021 to May 2026: see lending rates over time), and the direction is good news — with a qualification that swallows most of it.

The gap is narrowing

Average distance between advertised rate and all-in APR, across every bank reporting a one-year facility:

Fees are a smaller part of the cost of borrowing than they were. On every category, for every kind of customer.

And the smallest borrowers have gained least

Corporate fee load has halved. Household has fallen by not quite a third. Small business has fallen by a sixth.

Which means the disparity has grown rather than shrunk. In September 2024 a household borrower carried 2.1 times the fee load of a corporate one. By May 2026 that had become 2.9 times.

The direction is right for everybody and the distance between them is widening.

Why this matters more than the headline rate

Interest rates are visible. A bank advertises them, a borrower compares them, and news coverage reports when they move.

Fees are not. No Ghanaian bank publishes a breakdown of what its arrangement, processing and monitoring charges come to. The only reason these figures exist at all is that Bank of Ghana requires the calculation and publishes the result.

So a small business owner watching lending rates fall over the past two years would have had no way of knowing that their share of the improvement was a third of what a large corporate got.

What this does not establish

Four observations are not a trend. These are September 2024, March 2025, June 2025 and May 2026 — unevenly spaced, and the middle two move in different directions. A monthly series would show whether this is a steady decline or noise around one.

The banks reporting are not identical each time. Between nineteen and twenty-two institutions appear in each category and period. Some of the movement could be composition rather than behaviour.

And these are averages across each bank's whole book, not quotes. Bank of Ghana says plainly that a given borrower may be offered something different after assessment.

Why we could only find four reports

Bank of Ghana publishes this monthly. The current notice is on their site.

The previous ones are not. We checked eight earlier months and found no published notice for any of them — the analysis above is possible only because we had saved the PDFs as they appeared.

A monthly publication with no accessible archive can tell a borrower what credit costs today and nothing about whether it is getting better or worse. We have asked Bank of Ghana whether the older returns are available somewhere we have not found, and will publish what they say.

Meanwhile we are keeping every report as it publishes. In a year this table will have twelve more rows.

What the 22 banks charge now · Work out what a loan would cost