Money expert Martin Lewis is urging everyone with a Cash ISA to act now as the deadline to top up your tax-free savings is rapidly approaching.

The founder of Money Saving Expert has issued a ‘use it or lose it’ warning to savers that the limits are due to reset on April 6, 2026.

Because of the way Cash ISAs work, if you don’t maximise the amount you can deposit before the start of the next tax year, you can never get it back, and miss out on a chunk of tax-free savings.

Because the £20,000 limit is a limit per year, not a total limit, many Cash ISA savers have hundreds of thousands of pounds stashed away in Cash ISAs after having maximised the deposit limits for years on end.

But if you don’t use up all of your £20,000 allowance by the end of April 5, the limits will reset the next day, and you have another year to use up the following £20,000 limit.

Speaking on the latest episode of The Martin Lewis Podcast on March 19, Martin said: “The ISA deadline is April 5, that’s when the ISA year closes, because it’s the end of the tax year and you have an ISA allowance, a savings or investing allowance, that you can use each year.

“And if you do not use it, you lose it. And that’s why we’re talking ISAs today.”

Martin explained how ISAs work, adding: “An ISA is a tax wrapper as I like to think about it. Think about it like cling film. So here you go, you’ve got a piece of cake.

“Could be cash, could be chocolate cake, it could be shares, strawberry cake, it doesn’t really matter. Normally, the problem with that is when you get interest on savings or when you have capital gains or dividends paid on shares.

“Along can come the taxman or woman and they can take a bite out of it.

“All an ISA is is a piece of cling film you can put around your cash, around your savings, and they can no longer bite it.”

He added: “A Cash ISA is just a savings account where your interest is never taxed.”

Martin went on to pluck out some of the best Cash ISAs currently on offer, including some which you can transfer your existing ISA savings into in order to boost your interest rate.

He said: “The top new customer only rate at the moment is a company called Trading212 at 4.68%. This is a Cash ISA. 1% of that is a bonus only for newbies, so if you are not new to Trading212 you will not get that rate. Similar is with Plum at 4.66%. On the Trading212 Cash ISA, you can’t get that rate direct, that is a comparison site rate so you can get it on most comparison sites but if you go direct you won’t get that rate, just to complicate it. And you can’t do transfers.

“So if you’re looking for an ISA for new money or transfers or just transfers, there’s Moneybox at 4.26% is the top rate that includes transfers…there’s also Vida Savings, and all of these have little caveats like the amount of money you can withdraw a year.”