Best Business Checking Accounts for Independent Contractors & Handymen (2025)

If you're an independent contractor or handyman, your personal checking account isn't doing you any favors. Mixing business income with personal spending — known as commingling — makes tax season a headache, blurs your professional image, and does nothing for your business credit score. The right business checking account solves all three.

We've combed through the options, leaning on expert analysis from NerdWallet1 and North One2, to find the accounts that actually serve the way sole proprietors work: mobile-first, invoice-ready, and built to keep tax time from becoming a crisis.

Best for Credit Building: Lili BusinessBuild

Why it wins: Lili's BusinessBuild account is one of the few business checking products that actively reports your on-time payments to business credit bureaus. For a new contractor building a credit history from scratch, that's a game-changer.

Lili also bundles built-in invoice tools, automatic expense categorization, and a tax-savings bucket that sets aside a percentage of every deposit. There's no monthly fee, and you can open an account in minutes from your phone.

The trade-off: Cash deposits aren't supported at all — Lili is purely digital. If you're a handyman who gets paid in cash on the job site, you'll need a secondary solution for depositing those bills.

Best for International Work: Wise Business

Why it wins: Contractors working with overseas clients or sourcing materials from international suppliers know the pain of foreign exchange fees. Wise Business offers real-time mid-market exchange rates on 40+ currencies, with transparent, low fees that are a fraction of what traditional banks charge.1

You get local bank details in the US, UK, EU, Australia, and more — meaning clients can pay you as if you were local. Multi-currency holding and batch payments round out a toolkit built for the globally-minded contractor.

The trade-off: Wise isn't a full-service bank. There's no credit building, no lending, and no cash deposit network. It's a specialist tool for a specific need.

Best for Payments: PayPal for Business

Why it wins: Love it or hate it, PayPal is everywhere. For contractors and handymen, that ubiquity matters: clients expect to pay via PayPal, and the platform's invoicing tools let you send professional, trackable invoices with a few taps.2

PayPal for Business also offers a business debit card (with cashback on select purchases), integration with major accounting software, and instant transfer options when you need funds fast. No monthly fee, no minimum balance.

The trade-off: Transaction fees (2.99% + fixed fee for card payments) eat into margins, and PayPal's hold policies can occasionally freeze funds for new accounts. It's best as a payment layer rather than your primary operating account.

Best for Tax Reserves: Quontic MMA

Why it wins: Quontic's Money Market Account (MMA) is a smart place to park your tax reserves. It offers a competitive annual percentage yield (APY) — well above the national average — while still giving you check-writing and debit card access when you need to pay quarterly estimated taxes.2

For independent contractors who need to set aside 25–30% of every payment for taxes, having that money earning interest instead of sitting idle in a zero-yield checking account is a no-brainer.

The trade-off: This is a money market account, not a full business checking account. You'll need a separate operating account for daily transactions. Quontic also requires a minimum opening deposit.

Comparison at a Glance

\Quontic MMA requires a minimum balance to waive fees.*

Why These Matter

The single biggest mistake independent contractors make is commingling personal and business funds. It complicates tax filings, weakens your professional credibility (clients paying a "John Smith" personal account vs. "Smith Contracting LLC"), and — most critically — prevents you from building business credit that could unlock loans or better terms down the road.1

The accounts above each solve a specific piece of that puzzle. For most contractors, the smartest setup is a combination: a primary operating account (Lili or PayPal) paired with a high-yield tax reserve account (Quontic) and, if you work internationally, a Wise Business account for cross-border transactions.

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