TD Safety Deposit Box: Prepare for a Service Price Hike

Originally published February 13, 2012. Revisited September 2026, because I’m still not over that letter, and because the fees have kept climbing.

Did I say hike? I meant hold up. In February 2012, I got a letter from TD informing me that my safe-deposit box, which I was paying $42 a year for, would jump to $80 after years of creeping increases. A mere 43% service charge increase. I wished my investments climbed at that rate.

Fourteen years later, the small box that cost $42 in 2011 will set you back $80 a year at TD. Assuming I was renting a small box, which the letter never confirmed and I wasn’t about to admit. My investments have done okay since then, but they’ve never once promised me a guaranteed annual increase.

The best part of the 2012 letter wasn’t even the rent hike. Lose your key, and the replacement went from $4.95 to $50, roughly a 1,000% increase. Ten times the old price. I wrote back then that only Ponzi schemes offered that kind of return, and I stand by it.

Need the box drilled because you lost the key and forgot the combination? In 2012, that was going from $104 to $200. The current drilling fee isn’t in TD’s published fee schedule; the bank seems shy about it, but I’m assuming it hasn’t gotten cheaper.

Current TD pricing, from the bank’s own pages: small box $80 a year, medium $135, large $200, oversize $10 per square inch. So the box I was complaining about at $60 in 2012 is now $80, and if you’re in a medium, you’ve nearly tripled from my original $42. That’s not a fee schedule, that’s a staircase.

What other industry gets away with this? I said “only the banks” in 2012. I’ll amend that: the banks are the artists; telecoms and insurance companies are diligent students.

I also need to correct myself on something. In the original, I said the safety deposit box rental “is also tax deductible.” That’s no longer true. That changed in 2014.

There’s a modern twist I didn’t anticipate. TD’s All-Inclusive Banking Plan includes a small safe deposit box as a perk. So the “rich folk” line from 2012 has aged badly: today’s way to get a “free” box is to keep enough money sitting in a TD chequing account that the bank decides you’re worthy. The rest of us pay retail.

I always end up torn in these situations. As a blogger, this remains astoundingly good fodder. As a customer, I’m bloody annoyed. But, as a shareholder, well, TD has had a rougher decade than the dividend cheques suggest, so I’m not rubbing my hands quite as gleefully as I was in 2012. But the fees are still coming in, and the dividends are still arriving.

Anyone else still renting a box? Does anybody care? The boxes are emptying as we digitize everything, and the banks know it. That’s exactly why the fees keep climbing; they’re squeezing the captive remainder. Moving a safe deposit box is a genuine hassle: you have to physically haul your stuff to another branch. The banks know that inertia is their moat.

I’m down to one box, holding the things that are too awkward to scan, but that will change soon. A home safe or strongbox might work just as well.