How Much Bank Balance Do You Need for a UK or Schengen Visit Visa?

Nobody at our office will give you a number, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. For a UK Standard Visitor visa there is no published minimum balance. For Schengen there is a daily subsistence requirement, but it is set by each country, it changes, and it is far smaller than the figures that circulate on WhatsApp.

What both systems actually assess is whether you can pay for this specific trip without working illegally, and whether the money in front of them is genuinely yours.

Somebody was approved with eight lakh in their account and told their cousin that eight lakh is the requirement. The cousin told a Facebook group. Three years later it is treated as a rule.

Those numbers are not requirements. They are one person's circumstances, repeated until they sounded official. We have seen files with far less approved and files with far more refused, and in almost every case the difference was not the amount.

Is it enough for the trip you described? A ten-day trip to London with hotels already booked and a relative covering meals needs less than three weeks across Europe paying your own way. The figure follows the trip, not the other way round.

Is it yours? Money that has sat in your account, moving in a pattern consistent with your income, reads as yours. Money that arrived last week does not.

Can you explain it? This is the real test. Any large credit should have a story the documents support — sale of a property, a bonus, a transfer from a family member who can show where it came from.

Here is the pattern we see most often. An applicant is told they need a certain balance. A relative transfers that amount a week before the application. The statement shows a flat, modest balance for five months and then a single large credit.

To a caseworker this is not evidence of funds. It is evidence that somebody was told a number and arranged to meet it. It frequently produces a refusal that then follows the applicant into every future application.

If a relative is genuinely funding your trip, that is completely acceptable — but present it as sponsorship, with their documents, rather than disguising it as your own savings.

Schengen countries publish an amount per day of stay, which an applicant must show they have access to. The figure differs by country and is updated periodically, so the only reliable source is the consulate you are applying to, at the time you apply.

Two things people miss. First, prepaid hotels and flights reduce what you need to show for living costs, because the consulate can see those costs are already met. Second, access can include a sponsor's funds, correctly documented — it does not all have to sit in your own account.

Get statements from the bank, stamped, covering the recent months the guidance asks for, with your name and account number printed on them. Screenshots from a banking app are routinely rejected.

Use the account where your life happens. A dormant account holding a round figure tells a caseworker nothing useful; a working account showing salary in and bills out tells them a great deal.

If you have a choice between adding to the balance and improving the rest of the file, improve the rest of the file.

A clear employer letter with approved leave. A business with visible activity and filed returns. Previous travel, used and returned from. A trip whose dates, bookings and costs agree with each other. These carry more weight than another zero on a statement, and unlike the balance they cannot be arranged in a week.

Bring the statements you have, not the statements you think we want. If the file is weak, we would rather say so before you pay an embassy fee than after it is gone. Sometimes the right advice is to wait three months and build a cleaner record.

And no — no balance guarantees a visa. The embassy decides. Money is one input among several, and on its own it has never been the thing that got anybody approved.