US freelancer accounts, picked for tax.

The US self-employed market splits into four legal-entity shapes, and the right banking product depends mostly on which shape you sit in. Pure 1099 contractors — gig-economy workers, freelance designers, freelance writers, contract developers — file a Schedule C against their personal 1040 and report income on a 1099-NEC from each payer; they can open with an SSN. Sole proprietors are a slightly more formalised version of the same: same Schedule C, but typically with an EIN registered for vendor W-9s and a "Doing Business As" registered with the state. Single-member LLCs are taxed by default as a disregarded entity (still Schedule C) but are a separate legal person for banking and liability — which means EIN-only onboarding and a strict separation between owner and entity bank accounts. S-corp owners, finally, run payroll for themselves, file Form 1120-S, and need a banking product that supports payroll runs (Gusto, Justworks, ADP), distributions, and operating-cash management as separate flows.

The five products below are not interchangeable. Mercury is the obvious choice for incorporated freelancers and small operating teams who want sweep-protected balances and a developer-grade integration surface. Lili and Found are purpose-built for 1099 individuals who want the tax layer woven into the bank account itself — Lili leans toward gig-economy and creator freelancers, Found leans toward traditional sole-prop service businesses. Novo sits in the middle, strong on invoicing and integrations but lighter on the tax buckets. Bluevine is the outlier: a small-business product that pays meaningful APY on operating cash, which makes it the right fit when you already run an LLC or S-corp with a healthy balance and want yield on idle deposits rather than hand-holding on quarterly estimates.

The thing that separates a freelancer-built US bank from a generic small-business account is how it handles the tax layer. Three mechanics matter, and most of the structural value of Lili and Found sits in getting them right.

1099-NEC income classification. Pure 1099 contractors receive a 1099-NEC from every client who paid them more than $600 in a calendar year, and the deposits matching those forms have to land in Schedule C, line 1. Lili and Found auto-classify incoming deposits — Lili against a 1099-friendly default category set, Found against the literal Schedule C lines (1, 2, 4, 6) so year-end export drops straight into TurboTax Self-Employed, H&R Block Self-Employed, or a CPA's prep file. Mercury, Novo and Bluevine offer category tagging and QuickBooks / Xero export but do not do the Schedule C mapping in-app.

Quarterly estimated-tax savings buckets. US self-employed taxpayers owe federal quarterly estimates four times a year (15 April, 15 June, 15 September, 15 January) plus state estimates in most states, and the IRS underpayment penalty is real. Lili maintains a separate Tax Bucket inside the same account; Found computes a continuous estimate of federal quarterly liability and rings-fences the projected amount on the dashboard. Neither product files for you — you still send the cash via EFTPS or IRS Direct Pay — but the visibility removes the "I forgot to set aside enough" failure mode.

Stripe / Square / PayPal payout integration. Most US freelancers receive at least some income through these processors, and the bank should treat those deposits as first-class income rather than as generic ACH. All five do; Mercury and Novo additionally allow programmatic API access to the deposit feed for users running their own bookkeeping or invoicing stack. The Stripe integration matters specifically because a Stripe payout aggregates many individual sales — without the right tagging, your books read one deposit when you actually had thirty.

Sole proprietors can usually open with an SSN — Lili and Found explicitly support this, and the IRS does not require an EIN unless you have employees, run payroll, or operate as a separate taxable entity. The practical advice in 2026 is still: get an EIN anyway. The application is free, takes about fifteen minutes online at irs.gov, and an EIN keeps your SSN off vendor W-9 forms — a non-trivial privacy and identity-fraud benefit when your tax ID lives on every contract you sign. Single-member LLCs need an EIN to be banked correctly as a separate legal person; Mercury and Bluevine require it for any business product. S-corp owners need an EIN plus a state-level entity filing and, for Mercury, formation documents (articles of incorporation, operating agreement, EIN letter from the IRS).

Every product in this ranking is scored against five freelancer-specific dimensions: 1099-NEC income classification depth, quarterly tax-bucket workflow, EIN-vs-SSN onboarding flexibility, integration surface (QuickBooks / Xero / Stripe / Square / PayPal / Gusto), and FDIC protection mechanics. Scores roll up against the same six-dimension master scorecard used across the worldwide index — see /methodology/. The affiliate-disclosure ledger is at /disclosure/; affiliate status does not change the ranking. We exclude pre-paid debit programs, NCUA-insured credit-union digital fronts, crypto-native "neobanks", and branchless divisions of legacy banks (Capital One Spark, Chase for Business) — the latter sit on a multi-decade banking licence and have a different competitive shape.

For US-incorporated solo founders, single-member LLCs and small operating teams, Mercury is the right answer — the IntraFi Sweep network protects past $250K, the developer surface is best-in-class, and the QuickBooks / Xero / Stripe integrations are first-class. For 1099 contractors and gig-economy freelancers who want the tax layer baked into the account, Lili and Found are the two purpose-built choices: Lili leans creator-and-gig, Found leans sole-prop service business with a continuous quarterly-estimate engine. Novo is the pick when invoicing and integrations matter more than tax automation — pair it with a separate quarterly-tax workflow. Bluevine is the outlier and the only one in this list that pays meaningful APY on business operating cash; right answer when you already run an LLC or S-corp with a healthy balance and want yield rather than hand-holding. None of these replace a CPA or a tax-prep tool; they organise the inputs so that the year-end filing is straightforward rather than archaeological.