When does your bonus category card stop winning?

A bonus rate is printed on the card as though it were a property of the card. It behaves more like a quantity, and you can run out of it partway through the quarter without being told.

A cap turns one card into two

Chase prints the rule plainly for the Freedom Flex: you "earn 5% Cash Back rewards total for each $1 spent until $1,500 is spent on combined purchases in the quarterly bonus categories each quarter". ¹ After that threshold, the terms continue, "you go back to earning 1% Cash Back rewards for each $1 spent, with no maximum". ¹

So the card pays 5% on the first $1,500 of category spending in the quarter and 1% on everything after. ¹ The maximum the bonus rate can pay in a quarter is $75.

Nothing announces the change. The rate on your next purchase drops by four fifths at a threshold you have to be counting to see.

The switch comes before the totals say it does

Here is the part that misleads people who check their rewards summary.

Suppose you put $2,500 of category spending on the card in a quarter. The first $1,500 earns 5%, which is $75, and the remaining $1,000 earns 1%, which is $10, for $85 in the quarter. A flat 2% card would have earned $50 on the same $2,500.

The bonus card is ahead, and it stays ahead on the running total all quarter. That total is a record of the past and it answers no question about what to do next.

Put the $1,000 above the cap on the flat 2% card instead and it earns $20 rather than $10, so the quarter ends at $95. The same spending, the same two cards in your pocket, and $10 of the difference comes from noticing the threshold.

The two resets to track

Rotating categories reset twice, and the two are easy to conflate.

• The cap refills at the start of the issuer's next period, which is a calendar quarter for most rotating programmes rather than your statement date.
• The category itself changes, so the card that won at the supermarket in one quarter may earn its base rate there in the next.

There is a third condition that is not a reset at all. Chase requires that you "activate your 5% Bonus Cash Back each quarter by the activation deadline". ^{1 2} A quarter you forgot to activate pays the base rate on everything, and no cap was involved.

What this means for picking a card

The question that decides a purchase is narrow. For this category, on this card, is the cap already spent?

Three numbers answer it: the cap, what you have spent against it in the current period, and the base rate waiting on the other side. Only the first is printed on the card. The second is the one nobody has unless something is keeping it, which is why CardLab tracks spending against each cap per card and stops ranking a card on a rate it can no longer pay.

One caveat outranks all of this. If you are carrying a balance, settle that before any earn-rate comparison, because interest outruns the gap between a bonus rate and a base rate: see when cashback loses to interest.