Maximizing Amex Bonuses

Tl;dr: Beware of rules limiting sign up bonuses on lower-tier cards when you’ve had the more premium versions

Banks will often offer $1,000+ in points or miles to get a new customer for a card, so if you want to earn a lot of free travel, perhaps the easiest way to do it is to take advantage of these lucrative sign up bonuses. To keep savvy consumers from taking too much advantage of these opportunities, banks impose limits on these bonuses or new customers, like Chase’s infamous 5/24 rule. Amex has recently changed its rules to limit card churn, and the changes are likely to make a big difference in the optimal strategy for signing up for Amex cards.

The rule

Until recently, Amex has limited sign up bonuses to one per card, per customer. Unlike other banks that might allow you to cancel a card and sign up again later to receive a new bonus (e.g. after 48 months from your previous bonus), once you had had a card in your wallet, that was the only bonus you’d be able to receive. With 17 personal cards available, plus speciality cards from Schwab and Morgan Stanley, and business cards to boot, this wasn’t so bad. 

The new rule, however, prevents bonuses on lower-tier cards when you’ve had a more premium card within the same card family. If you’ve had the $695-fee Amex Platinum, you won’t be eligible for the $325-fee Gold or $150-fee Green. If you’ve ever had the $650 Delta Reserve card, you can’t get a bonus on the $350-fee Delta Platinum or the $150-fee Delta Gold card. And so on. 

Bonus restrictions on the Amex Green card. 

The implications

The old advice used to be, “start with the Amex Platinum.” With tools like CardMatch, you could often get 150k points or more by signing up for the Platinum as your first Amex card, an offer that Amex wouldn’t necessarily extend to existing customers. You could then add the Gold card with its more favorable net fee and superpowered points-earning later for another 60k-point+ bonus.

Now, it is probably better to start with the Gold. With good timing, you could potentially get a massive sign up bonus:

My referral offer as of August 18th, 2024.

You can then get another bonus on the Platinum later, and even if that bonus is “only” 100k points, you’ll probably still be better off than if you had the Platinum bonus alone.

The same goes for other card families. Where the lower tier cards are excellent, you’ll probably want to work your way up the ladder. These include the Delta cards (starting with the Gold), Blue Cash, Everyday, and Hilton cards (possibly excluding the Surpass). However, on the Marriott side, the Bevy is dreadful, so I wouldn’t pick it up just to climb the bonus ladder to the Brilliant. However, this will always depend on the exact offers in question, so you’ll want to do a little research. 

Conclusion

Although this is bad news for Amex enthusiasts, it’s still possible to get many good Amex welcome offers with good strategy, and the strategy isn’t too hard to implement–just work your way up the card ladder in the families of cards that you like. Amex also refreshes its card offerings from time to time, so new cards might come online with new bonus opportunities. And Amex has left themselves some wiggle room in the terms of the restriction (“you may not be eligible”), and banks do sometimes loosen these restrictions over time. But if you’ve been thinking you’d like a premium Amex card in the future, you might want to start thinking about getting an lower-level card first.