How many ISAs can you have?

How many ISAs can you actually have?

However many you have opened over the years. There is no cap on the number of ISA accounts you can hold across your lifetime, and no requirement to close old ones or consolidate them. Accounts opened a decade ago with a provider that has since changed its name, or even stopped offering ISAs to new customers, are still yours to keep. What limits you is not the number of accounts, but how much new money you subscribe across all of them in a single tax year: £20,000 for 2026/27.

What changed on 6 April 2024

Before 6 April 2024, you could subscribe to only one ISA of each type per tax year: one Cash ISA, one Stocks and Shares ISA, and one Innovative Finance ISA. Since 6 April 2024, that restriction has gone for those three types. You can now open and pay into as many Cash ISAs, or as many Stocks and Shares ISAs, as you like within the same tax year, provided your combined subscriptions do not go over £20,000.

Why hold more than one of the same type?

A few practical reasons come up often. Splitting cash savings across two banks can keep each balance under the FSCS protection limit of £120,000 per person, per authorised firm, if your total savings are large enough for that to matter. Opening a new Cash ISA with a better rate partway through the year, without disturbing money already committed to a fixed-rate account elsewhere, is another common one. Keeping separate pots for separate goals, one Cash ISA for an emergency fund and another for a house deposit, for example, is a third. None of these were possible within a single tax year before 6 April 2024 without transferring, only afterwards.

An example: splitting £20,000 across ISAs

gov.uk’s own worked example shows how this looks in practice: £10,000 subscribed to one Cash ISA, £3,000 to a second Cash ISA, and £7,000 to a Stocks and Shares ISA, all within the same tax year. That is £20,000 in total, split across three accounts and two ISA types, and it is entirely permitted under the current rules. Before 6 April 2024, the two separate Cash ISA subscriptions in that example would not have been allowed in the same year.

The Lifetime ISA exception

The Lifetime ISA did not follow the other three types into this change. You can still only subscribe to one Lifetime ISA in any given tax year, up to its own £4,000 limit, which counts inside your overall £20,000. If you already hold a Lifetime ISA and want to switch provider, you would transfer the existing one rather than open and pay into a second.

Fatima wants to do exactly this. She has £14,000 already committed to a fixed-rate Cash ISA she opened in the summer, and £6,000 more she wants to save before the tax year ends. Rather than being locked out because she already has a Cash ISA, she opens a second Cash ISA with a different provider for the extra £6,000. Her two Cash ISAs add up to £20,000 for the year, and both are entirely valid, a combination that would not have been allowed before 6 April 2024.

Junior ISAs: a different limit

The same-type rule for Junior ISAs is narrower still. A child can hold one cash Junior ISA and one Stocks and Shares Junior ISA at a time, a maximum of one of each, not several of either. The Junior ISA limit itself, £9,000 for 2026/27, is entirely separate from any adult ISA allowance, so a parent’s own subscriptions elsewhere do not reduce it.

What hasn’t changed

The same-type rule change in 2024 was about flexibility, not extra allowance. Innovative Finance ISAs got the same freedom as cash and Stocks and Shares ISAs to be opened more than once a year, but the overall £20,000 limit did not move for any ISA type, and it still has not moved for 2026/27. Holding five Cash ISAs instead of one does not give you five times the tax-free room; it only gives you five places to put the same £20,000, or less, if you choose to spread it that way.

Does this change under the 2027 Cash ISA cap?

Not in terms of how many accounts you can hold. From 6 April 2027, anyone 64 or under at the end of the tax year is limited to £12,000 in Cash ISA subscriptions, but that limit applies to the total across every Cash ISA you hold, not per account. Opening a second or third Cash ISA does not create extra room in cash; it only spreads the same £12,000 across more providers. If Fatima’s example above happened in 2027/28 instead of this tax year, her two Cash ISAs together would be capped at £12,000, not £20,000, unless she was 65 or over at the end of that tax year. See the Cash ISA limit from 2027 for the full detail on that change. Tax treatment depends on your circumstances and may change.