Time Deposits Philippines 2026: Why Big-4 TDs Lost After CMEPA

A Big-4 bank Time Deposit has been the default shelf for parked pesos for thirty years. In 2026 that default is wrong, but it is wrong in a narrower and more uncomfortable way than it was three months ago. The digital banks that made the case obvious have been cutting hard: Tonik repriced its entire TD ladder twice inside three weeks, and its headline 12-month rate is now 5.5% p.a. (gross). Meanwhile Philippine headline inflation ran at 6.4% in June 2026 (PSA June 2026 CPI report, figures carried by Rappler; psa.gov.ph blocks automated retrieval, so that is a named secondary standing in for the primary).

Put those two facts together and you get the honest 2026 headline: no peso time deposit in the country currently beats inflation after tax. The best one loses by about two points a year. The Big-4 regular TD loses by six.

That does not make the choice unimportant. It makes it a loss-minimisation choice, which is exactly the kind of decision people get wrong by defaulting.

The 2026 verdict, ranked by post-tax APY

The ranking backs CMEPA’s 20% withholding out of every gross rate, treats minimums and caps as binding constraints, and asks where a peso under a 12-month horizon should sit. Pre-July-2025 grandfathered TDs are off the table; those balances stay where they are.

The table below reads straight from the LiveInPH deposit-rate ledger, which is why it can carry something a comparison site cannot: rows we could not re-verify at the issuer’s own site are marked as such, in the row, and are not quietly refreshed from somewhere else. Five of the ten rows are flagged right now. The method behind the ledger is on the methodology page, and the full dataset catalogue is at /data.

To run your own balance, lock-in horizon, real return after inflation, and the PDIC-safe split above PHP 1M, use the PHP Savings Real-Return calculator.

Two things fall out of that table. First, the spread between the best digital TD and a Big-4 regular peso TD is still roughly 11x to 44x on post-tax yield, for the same lock-up and the same PDIC insurance. Second, the spread has been closing from the top, not from the bottom: Tonik’s 12-month rate came down 250 basis points in a month while BDO’s regular schedule did not move at all. The gap is narrowing because the good option got worse.

The only cases where a BPI or BDO regular TD still wins: a balance far above the digital-bank caps where single-institution simplicity has real operational value, a relationship-priced tier negotiated off the published sheet, or a need for a TD-secured loan facility the digital banks do not offer.

What CMEPA broke on 1 July 2025

The Capital Markets Efficiency Promotion Act (RA 12214) is why the 2026 TD stack does not look like the 2024 stack. Before the cut-over, interest on a peso TD held five years or longer was exempt from the final withholding tax entirely, with a tiered schedule below that (5% at four-to-five years, 12% at three-to-four). That exemption was worth a fifth of the coupon every year, and it was the whole reason a long-dated Big-4 TD made sense for parked retirement cash.

CMEPA flattened it. From 1 July 2025, every bank-deposit interest payment pays a flat 20% final withholding tax, regardless of tenor or amount. Foreign-currency deposits moved in the opposite direction, from 15% to 20%. Placements made before 1 July 2025 keep their original tax treatment to original maturity, which the banks’ own customer advisories confirm (RCBC’s CMEPA advisory is the clearest published summary; it is a bank’s advisory, not the statute).

Final withholding means the 20% settles the BIR obligation in full: no annual return entry, no separate filing. The bank deducts at maturity, or at each interest payment on a staggered payout. BIR Form 2306 (Certificate of Final Tax Withheld) is retrievable on request and is worth keeping if you carry US, UK or Australian tax residency exposure. Documentary stamp tax on a TD held to maturity sits with the bank. On an early break it may not, which the next section deals with.

Tonik: still the top of a shrinking stack

Tonik Digital Bank’s ladder is still the best published peso TD rate in the country. Its 12-month rate is also 250 basis points lower than it was in April. The current curve, on Tonik’s own deposit interest rates page, which now publishes an old-rate/new-rate table:

• 6-month: 4.5% p.a. (gross) gross, 3.6% APY (post-tax, after 20% final withholding) after tax
• 9-month: 5% p.a. (gross) gross, 4% APY (post-tax, after 20% final withholding) after tax
• 12-month: 5.5% p.a. (gross) gross, 4.4% APY (post-tax, after 20% final withholding) after tax
• 18 and 24-month: 5% p.a. (gross) gross. The curve still inverts past 12 months, so the 12-month is the rung to anchor a ladder on

That reprice pattern is the thing to internalise, not the rate itself. Two cuts in sixteen days, 150 basis points then 100 on the 12-month rate, is a bank repricing its funding cost quickly because it can. A rate you read here, or anywhere, is a rate that was true on its effective date. It is not a rate you are being offered. Check the issuer’s page before you place, which is why every row in our ledger carries its own effective date and its own source link.

The inflation arithmetic no longer flatters anything. Headline inflation ran 7.2% in April 2026, 6.8% in May and 6.4% in June, with the January-to-June average at 4.8%. Even the 12-month TD’s post-tax yield sits below that six-month average, and well below the June print. A peso TD in mid-2026 is not a way to grow money. It is a way to lose less of it than a savings account does, with a lock-up attached.

Each Tonik TD is capped at ₱250,000/TD (2026-06) and a single account runs up to five concurrent TDs, giving a hard ceiling of ₱1,250,000 (2026-06) across the ladder. Entry minimum is ₱5,000 (2026-06) per TD. All PDIC-insured to ₱1,000,000/depositor per bank (2025-03).

The old “will this digital bank survive?” objection has largely closed. Tonik reported consolidated positive net income for Q1 2026 and describes itself as the first standalone digital bank in the Philippines to reach profitability. PDIC cover plus demonstrated profitability is the case for treating Tonik as the default peso TD shelf rather than a yield-chasing satellite. The case for the shelf itself is a separate and weaker argument in 2026.

Big-4 peso TDs: the regular-rate floor and the Metrobank exception

BPI and BDO run the two largest TD books in the country, and their regular peso TD rates are why “Big-4 TD” became shorthand for dead money. BDO’s last schedule we could read is 0.125%–0.5% p.a. (gross) (BDO Peso Time Deposit product page, Apr 2026 — UNVERIFIED at the last sweep) across terms and balance tiers, and bdo.com.ph timed out on every attempt to re-read it on 12 July 2026, so that row is flagged rather than refreshed. BPI does not publish a regular peso TD rate sheet online at all, which is a finding rather than an oversight; our ledger carries a representative band flagged low-confidence rather than pretending to a transcribed rate. Neither figure is a quote you can hold a bank to, and both pay the 20% withholding on top. What is not in doubt is the order of magnitude: against June’s 6.4% inflation, a Big-4 regular TD loses real purchasing power every quarter it sits.

What keeps those books alive is balance size. Tonik caps at PHP 1.25M across the ladder; MariBank, Maya and CIMB have their own effective ceilings. Someone parking PHP 5M of property-sale proceeds cannot fit that into the digital stack without splitting across four or five institutions, each with its own KYC and its own operational overhead.

The carve-out is Metrobank’s Online Time Deposit, at 4.125%–5% p.a. (gross) (Metrobank Online Time Deposit (rates eff. 15 May 2026), 15 May 2026) across four balance tiers, from a PHP 10,000 minimum and a one-month term (Metrobank’s rate page). The top of that band needs a PHP 10M balance and the longest tenor, so read the tier you actually qualify for rather than the headline. At the entry tier it gives up about 1.4 points of yield against Tonik’s 12-month rate, but it is a universal bank with no relationship gate, which no other Big-4 product offers. Metrobank’s branch peso TD, confusingly, is priced like BDO’s: the Online product is the exception, not the bank.

CIMB’s MaxSave TD repriced on 1 June 2026 to 3.25%–4% p.a. (gross) (CIMB MaxSave Time Deposit rate advisory (rates effective 1 June 2026), 01 Jun 2026). The top of that band is the CIMB Prime tier, not the regular one, and CIMB discontinued the 24-month tenor entirely on 14 April 2026 for new placements and renewals.

Four more rows carry an UNVERIFIED marker for the same family of reasons. MariBank’s help-centre TD article no longer serves its rate content. Maya’s Time Deposit Plus table would not load for us this month. BDO’s peso TD schedule timed out on repeated attempts. And BPI, as above, has no rate sheet to fetch in the first place. All four show their last confirmed figures, unchanged, with the flag attached, and none of them was topped up from a comparison site to make the table look complete.

Five flagged rows out of ten is the actual finding here, and it is worth sitting with. Half of the peso TD market will not show a machine a readable, dated rate. Every site that prints a tidy ten-row table with a fresh number in every cell is either reading those numbers off each other or making them up. We would rather publish the holes.

The pre-termination trap, and what “principal intact” actually means

The most under-discussed mechanic in PH time deposits is what happens when you break one. Published rates ignore it, the schedule sits in the fine print, and the popular version of it is wrong in both directions.

Big-4 (BPI, BDO, Metrobank, Security Bank). The contracted rate is voided. Accrued interest is recomputed at the bank’s regular savings rate, a fraction of one percent, for the elapsed period, and a pre-termination charge may apply on top. Net effect: effectively no interest, and possibly a small nick out of principal.

Tonik. Break it inside the five-day cooling-off period and you get a full refund with no interest and no documentary stamp tax. Break it after that and Tonik recomputes the interest at the Tonik Account rate of 1.00% p.a. for the days actually elapsed, then deducts withholding tax and documentary stamp tax. Tonik’s own FAQ states the formula and adds the warning plainly: you may receive less than your original investment amount (Tonik’s pre-termination FAQ). Early withdrawal is all-or-nothing; there is no partial break.

So the line that “digital banks return your principal intact” is not right, and this article said so for two months. It is closer to say that the digital penalty is smaller and better documented, not that it is free.

Worked: a PHP 250,000 12-month Tonik TD broken at month six earns roughly PHP 1,000 of interest after withholding, at the 1.00% account rate, before DST. Held to maturity it earns about PHP 11,000. The break costs you around 90% of the expected interest and leaves principal roughly, but not exactly, whole. A Big-4 regular TD broken at the same point costs you close to 100% of an interest figure that was negligible to begin with, and can dip into principal via the pre-termination charge.

USD Time Deposits: a gap we are not going to paper over

The received wisdom is that PH-domiciled USD time deposits pay close to nothing, and that dollars are better held offshore. The structural argument for that is sound: USD deposits sit inside the FCDU framework, where reserve requirements and thin domestic USD lending demand cap what a PH bank can profitably pay, and CMEPA raised the tax on foreign-currency deposit interest from 15% to 20%, so the post-tax figure got worse rather than better.

What we will not do is put a number on it. On 12 July 2026 we could not obtain a single PH-domiciled USD TD rate sheet from an issuer’s own site: BDO’s dollar time deposit page timed out repeatedly, and BPI publishes no rate table. Every figure circulating for PH dollar TD yields traces back to comparison sites, and comparison sites are not a source. So: we do not currently know what a PH USD time deposit pays, and we are telling you that instead of guessing.

The practical guidance survives without the number, because it rests on the structure rather than the basis point. For USD savings of any size held longer than 90 days, keep the dollars offshore, where a US-domiciled money-market fund (Schwab Value Advantage, Vanguard’s VMFXX, Fidelity’s SPRXX) publishes a live 7-day SEC yield you can read for yourself before you decide. The corridor cost of moving money out, covered in sending money out of the Philippines, is a small one-off against a recurring yield difference. A PH USD TD makes sense for 30-to-90-day operational parking: a USD-denominated landlord, a buffer before a planned wire, dollars staged for a PH-side spend. Not for savings.

One more reason to be careful here: PDIC pays out in pesos regardless of the underlying account currency. A dollar balance in a PH FCDU time deposit, force-converted at a closure peg, may not return the dollars you put in.

PDIC’s PHP 1M ceiling and the split question

PDIC raised deposit insurance to ₱1,000,000/depositor per bank (2025-03) effective 15 March 2025, up from ₱500,000 (2025-03). The ceiling applies uniformly across peso and foreign-currency deposits at every PDIC-member bank: Big-4, mid-tier, and BSP-licensed digital. Time deposits get exactly the same treatment as savings accounts.

That ceiling forces a balance-tier decision:

• Under PHP 1M in TDs. One institution. Ladder Tonik and stop thinking about it.
• PHP 1M to PHP 1.25M. Still fits Tonik’s ladder (5 × PHP 250k), but anything above PHP 1M at a single bank has an uninsured slice. Cap the Tonik position at PHP 1M and place the rest elsewhere.
• PHP 1.25M to PHP 2.5M. Two institutions. A full Tonik ladder plus a second bank for the balance.
• Above PHP 2.5M. The real question stops being which TD and becomes whether a TD is the right shelf at all. Pag-IBIG MP2 declared a 7.12% dividend for FY2025 (announced 27 February 2026; reported by the Philippine News Agency, a named secondary, from Pag-IBIG’s Chairman’s Report) and it is tax-exempt, so it beats every peso TD post-tax by a wide margin. It is a declared historical dividend, not a promised forward rate, and it wants a five-year lock. For eligible members, the MP2-plus-TD split usually wins.

Worked PHP 1M ladder, July 2026

For PHP 1,000,000 with a 12-to-18-month horizon and a normal emergency buffer, at the rates in the ledger today:

Blended post-tax yield: roughly 4.1% p.a., about PHP 41,000 on the PHP 1M stack. Against the same PHP 1M in a BDO regular peso TD at the top of its published band (0.4% post-tax, about PHP 4,000/year), the ladder adds roughly PHP 37,000 a year for the same PDIC-insured risk profile. That is the entire case for reading a rate sheet.

It is also, at 4.1% post-tax against 6.4% June inflation, a real loss of over two points. Nothing on the peso deposit shelf fixes that. MP2 does, for the people who can use it: substituting rung 1 with a PHP 250k MP2 placement at the declared 7.12% tax-free pays about PHP 17,800 a year against the rung’s PHP 11,000, trading a 12-month lock for a five-year one.

Three notes on the structure. The Tonik position is deliberately held at PHP 950k, not the full PHP 1.25M the ladder allows, so the entire balance sits inside PDIC’s per-bank ceiling. The rungs stagger so PHP 250k redeems every quarter rather than all at once. And Solo Stash, not a TD, carries the emergency buffer, because a TD that gets broken is worse than a liquid account that never had to be.

When a Time Deposit is the wrong shelf

Cash you might need inside six months. Covered above and worth repeating: the TD premium over Tonik’s liquid Solo Stash is about 150 basis points, and a single early break costs more than a year of it.

MP2-eligible with a five-year horizon. MP2’s tax-exempt dividend has beaten every TD in the country for years and did so again in FY2025. For an active Pag-IBIG member who can lock five years, MP2 is the core and TDs are the satellite, not the other way round.

Liquid PH-side net worth above PHP 5M, with any equity tolerance. Above that, the question is asset allocation, not deposit shelf. With inflation running at 6.4% and the best post-tax TD at 4.4%, a portfolio that is all deposits is choosing a guaranteed real loss. TDs become the cash slice, framed by the foreigner tax guide.

The close

The 2026 peso TD market has a few coherent shelves and a lot of legacy noise. Tonik’s ladder for balances under PHP 1.25M. Metrobank’s Online TD, or CIMB’s Prime tier, as the low-entry alternative a Big-4 regular TD is not. Negotiated relationship tiers for large balances that need one institution. Everything else, and specifically the BPI or BDO regular peso TD as an unexamined default, is the noise.

Defaulting into one without checking costs roughly four points of post-tax yield: on PHP 1M, around PHP 37,000 a year of avoidable opportunity cost. Then check the harder thing, which is whether a deposit is the right instrument at all this year, because at 6.4% inflation the best answer on this page still loses money slowly. Ladder for liquidity, keep the balance inside the PDIC ceiling, and accept that the 5-year tax-free TD is not coming back. For the account-opening mechanics underneath all of this, see the Cebu bank account guide and the best digital bank comparison.