Best App to Save for a House Deposit: the LISA Is Ending
The Treasury is withdrawing the Lifetime ISA. The best app to save for a house deposit still runs one, and opening now locks the old rules in.
The best app to save for a house deposit in the UK is not the one with the nicest round-up animation. It is whichever one holds the right tax wrapper, because the wrapper is worth a fifth of everything you put in and the app is worth a few pounds a month at most. That calculation changed on 22 June 2026, when the Treasury opened a consultation on withdrawing the Lifetime ISA and replacing it with a First Time Buyer ISA. Anyone saving a deposit right now needs to know what that does to their money, and the short version is that it makes opening a LISA more urgent, not less.
Rates below were taken from the Moneyfacts Lifetime ISA table on 17 September 2026 and are variable unless stated.
The short answer
- Highest rate on a cash Lifetime ISA: Moneybox, at 4.45% AER including a 1.64% bonus for the first 12 months, opened with £1.
- Closest runner-up: Plum, at 4.44% AER including a 1.32% bonus for 12 months, and it opens with 1p.
- Best if you want the mortgage side too: Tembo, at 4.00% AER including a 0.45% bonus for 12 months.
- Best if you cannot stand app-only banking: Paragon Bank’s Cash Lifetime ISA Issue 3 at 3.51% AER, opened online rather than through an app.
- Best for getting money into the pot at all: Plum or Chip, whose automatic transfers shift money before you notice it, then feed it into the LISA.
- Wrong tool for the job: any app that only gives you an easy-access pot, if you are a first-time buyer under 40 who has not opened a LISA yet.
Saving a deposit is two jobs, and most roundups only cover one
Job one is choosing the account the money sits in. Job two is getting money into it every month when there are more entertaining things to do with it. Apps are good at job two and mostly indifferent at job one, which is why a comparison ranked on features rather than wrapper gives you the wrong answer.
Job one is worth far more. Pay £4,000 into a Lifetime ISA in a tax year and the government adds £1,000 on top, a 25% bonus, and the interest on all of it is tax free. No auto-save feature on any app comes close to that. So the sensible order is: pick the LISA first, then pick whichever app makes you actually fund it, even if that means holding two apps.
What the Treasury has actually announced
This is the part that changes the decision, and most pages covering it have run ahead of the evidence.
The consultation ran from 10am on 22 June 2026 to 11:59pm on 18 August 2026. It proposes a First Time Buyer ISA to be offered in place of the Lifetime ISA. What the consultation document itself commits to:
- The FTB ISA would be open to anyone aged 18 and over, with no upper age limit. The LISA shuts out anyone who has not opened one before their 40th birthday.
- The bonus would be paid at exchange, with 90 days from claiming the bonus to complete the purchase, and no withdrawal charge. That removes the LISA’s worst feature.
- The bonus would only be available on a mortgage-funded purchase.
- Subscription limits, the property price cap and the level of the government bonus are all “to be confirmed at a future fiscal event”. The consultation says the cap “will match that of the LISA and HtB ISA when announced”.
- Transfers from a LISA into the new product would be blocked, to stop anyone collecting two bonuses on the same money.
Two things the document does not do: it does not set a launch date, and it does not set the bonus rate. Pages confidently telling you the FTB ISA launches in April 2028 with a 25% bonus are guessing at both. The consultation says only that the government wants it “available as soon as practically possible”.
The line that matters most for anyone saving today is this one: until the replacement arrives, “it will remain possible to open a LISA and LISA holders will be able to save into their LISA in line with the existing rules indefinitely.” Open one now and you keep paying in under today’s rules for as long as you like. Wait, and if you are over 40 by the time the window shuts, the LISA door closes on you permanently and you are waiting on a product with no announced start date, no announced limit and no announced bonus.
Read the First Time Buyer ISA consultation yourself if you want the full text. It is worth twenty minutes of anyone’s evening.
The cash Lifetime ISA apps, ranked on rate
| App | AER | Bonus included | Minimum to open | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moneybox Cash Lifetime ISA | 4.45% | 1.64% for 12 months | £1 | App |
| Plum Lifetime ISA | 4.44% | 1.32% for 12 months | 1p | App |
| Tembo Cash Lifetime ISA | 4.00% | 0.45% for 12 months | £1 | App |
| Paragon Bank Cash Lifetime ISA Issue 3 | 3.51% | None | £1 | Online |
Read that bonus column before the AER column. Moneybox leads by 0.01 of a percentage point over Plum today, but well over a third of Moneybox’s rate is an introductory bonus that falls away after a year, and Plum’s bonus is smaller. On a deposit fund you will hold for three or four years, the rate you drop to in year two matters more than the rate in the shop window. Neither provider guarantees what that will be, so check the underlying rate in the app before you decide, and set a reminder for the month your bonus ends.
Paragon is the outlier and the only one on the list that is not app-first. It pays the least, and it has no introductory bonus propping it up, which means the gap will narrow once the bonuses on the others expire.
For the full breakdown of each provider, including the stocks and shares versions, see our guide to the best Lifetime ISA apps.
Moneybox: the default pick, with one habit worth using
Moneybox holds the top cash LISA rate and runs both a cash and a stocks and shares version, so you can switch wrapper type without switching provider as your timeline changes. It opens with £1.
The feature worth turning on is the round-up. Every card payment rounds to the next pound and the difference goes into the pot. It is a small amount of money and it is not the reason to choose Moneybox, but it does one thing well: it makes the deposit fund something you interact with weekly rather than something you remember in January. Pair it with a fixed weekly deposit, which is where the real money comes from.
The £4,000 annual limit counts towards your overall £20,000 ISA allowance for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, so plan the rest of your saving around it rather than on top of it.
Tembo: worth the lower rate only if you need the mortgage side
Tembo pays 4.00% against Moneybox’s 4.45%, so on rate alone it loses. What it has instead is the mortgage half of the problem: affordability checks, and lending routes such as guarantor and family-assisted mortgages that a savings app does not touch.
That matters if your deposit is not going to reach the number on its own, which is the actual position a lot of first-time buyers are in. If your block is the deposit and nothing else, take the higher rate elsewhere.
Plum and Chip: the apps for job two
If money never reaches the LISA, the rate on the LISA is irrelevant. This is where the auto-save apps earn their place.
Plum reads your current account through open banking, works out what you can spare, and moves it without asking. It also runs its own Lifetime ISA at 4.44%, which means one app can do both jobs. Our Plum review covers how the automatic deposits behave over a few months, including the part where it gets the amount wrong and you have to rein it in.
Chip does the same job with a different personality, leaning on scheduled saves and round-ups rather than an algorithm guessing at your budget. Neither holds the government bonus unless you specifically open their LISA, so check which product your money is landing in. A generous auto-save feeding an ordinary easy-access pot is the single most common way first-time buyers leave the 25% bonus on the table.
Whichever you use, the transfer into a LISA has to be a deliberate act. Set it monthly and forget it.
The £450,000 trap, and the charge that is worse than it looks
Two rules break more LISA plans than any other.
The first is the property price cap: the home must cost £450,000 or less. That figure has not moved since 2017. If you are buying in London or the South East and your budget creeps over it, the LISA money is stuck, and the only way out is a withdrawal that triggers the charge.
The second is the charge itself. Take money out for anything other than a first home under the cap, serious ill health, or your 60th birthday, and you pay a 25% withdrawal charge. That is not the bonus being clawed back. It is 25% of the whole balance including the bonus, which works out as a loss of 6.25% of your own contributions. You end up with less than you put in.
The other conditions, from the government’s own guidance: you must buy at least 12 months after your first payment into the LISA, and a conveyancer or solicitor must act for you, because the provider pays the funds straight to them rather than to you.
So the honest rule is: only money you are certain is going into a first home under £450,000 belongs in a LISA. Everything else belongs in an easy-access account you can reach without a penalty. Our Lifetime ISA calculator will show you the bonus and the exit charge side by side on your own numbers.
Where the rest of the deposit should sit
Most people saving a deposit will breach the £4,000 LISA limit, or will have a target above the cap, or will want a chunk they can reach if the purchase falls through. That money wants an easy-access cash ISA or a savings pot inside your banking app, not a second LISA.
Watch the tax on it. Interest inside an ISA is tax free; interest in an ordinary savings pot counts against your personal savings allowance, and a large deposit fund at current rates can get there faster than people expect. Our guide to tax on savings app interest sets out the thresholds.
To sanity-check the timeline, run the target through our savings goal calculator before you commit to a monthly figure. Most deposit plans fail because the monthly number was set by optimism rather than arithmetic.
How to choose in one pass
- Under 40 and buying a first home under £450,000? Open a cash LISA this month, not next year. The rules you open under are the rules you keep.
- Want the highest rate today? Moneybox. Want the least dependence on a disappearing bonus? Compare the underlying rates before the intro period ends.
- Need help qualifying for the mortgage, not just funding the deposit? Tembo.
- Struggle to save at all? Add Plum or Chip on top, and make sure the money ends up in the LISA rather than a general pot.
- Saving above £4,000 a year, or buying above the cap? Keep the surplus in an easy-access cash ISA.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best app to save for a house deposit in the UK? For a first-time buyer under 40 buying below £450,000, a cash Lifetime ISA app, because the 25% government bonus outweighs any difference in interest rate or app features. Moneybox holds the top rate at 4.45% AER as of 17 September 2026, with Plum a hundredth of a point behind.
Should I still open a Lifetime ISA if it is being replaced? Yes, if you qualify. The consultation states that it remains possible to open a LISA until the replacement launches, and that existing holders can keep saving under current rules indefinitely. The replacement has no announced launch date, no announced contribution limit and no announced bonus rate.
Will the First Time Buyer ISA be better than the Lifetime ISA? On two points it looks better: no upper age limit and no withdrawal charge, with the bonus paid at exchange. On the points that decide how much money you get, the subscription limit, the property price cap and the bonus level, the consultation defers everything to a future fiscal event, so nobody can answer this yet.
Can I transfer my Lifetime ISA into the new product later? The consultation proposes blocking transfers from a LISA into the FTB ISA, to prevent anyone claiming a government bonus twice on the same savings. Treat a LISA you open now as a separate pot you run to completion.
How much do I lose if I withdraw from a Lifetime ISA early? You pay a 25% withdrawal charge on the amount taken out. Because that applies to the bonus as well as your own money, it costs you about 6.25% of your contributions, so you get back less than you paid in.
Do round-ups actually help save a deposit? Not on their own. Round-ups on a typical spending pattern add up to tens of pounds a month, against a deposit measured in tens of thousands. They are useful for keeping the goal visible, and they should sit alongside a fixed monthly transfer rather than instead of one.
