Missed Your Card’s Minimum Spend? Here’s What to Do

Earning a new credit card’s welcome bonus is the best way to rack up tens of thousands of points.

But life happens, and no matter how much we may try to meticulously track our spending through spreadsheets, apps and more, we sometimes come short of meeting the welcome offer’s minimum spending requirement. While missing out on a new card’s welcome offer is one of the many credit card mistakes you want to avoid, even the best of us can end up in a pinch.

With the minimum spend deadline looming, it can be easy to lose hope if you’ve fallen short of your planned expenditure and don’t know how to make up the difference.

However, in such cases, you need to get creative and consider all your possible options. So ditch the frantic Googling of “How to meet credit card minimum spend” and “Do balance transfers count towards minimum spend” and consider this article the answer to all your questions—your get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to reaching the minimum spend in a pinch.

We’re running through all the credit card minimum spend tricks for earning that welcome bonus. Not to mention, you also can apply these credit card spending strategies to any minimum spend-based perk from free night awards to companion fares and more.

What Is a Minimum Spending Requirement?

A minimum spending requirement is the minimum level of expenditure that you need to charge to your credit card over a fixed period of time to receive a welcome bonus or perk. The most common minimum spend requirement is for welcome bonuses.

For example, a welcome offer for a new card may have 100,000 points up for grabs if you charge $4,000 to your card within the first three months of card membership. In this case, the minimum spending requirement is $4,000.

Achieving the minimum spend for a new credit card’s welcome offer is one of the most important aspects of a successful credit-card strategy. Welcome offers give you the biggest bang for your buck per dollar spent and can enable you to book the award trips of your dreams.

For instance, if you spent $4,000 and received 100,000 points in return, that’s an effective points multiplier of 25X points per dollar spent—an unparalleled rate of return. That’s why it’s crucial to prioritize welcome offers in your card strategy and plan your upcoming expenditure to ensure you earn them.

That said, minimum spending requirements aren’t exclusive to welcome offers, even if they may be the most lucrative benefits. There are other card perks that require you to reach a certain spending threshold to access them.

Many co-branded hotel credit cards offer a free night award when you meet a spending requirement within a calendar year. Given that the timeline to hit the minimum spend is longer, the requirement is typically also higher compared to when earning a welcome offer.

For example, the Hilton Honors American Express Surpass® Card (see rates and fees) offers a free night award when you charge $15,000 on eligible purchases to your card within a calendar year. Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt all offer cards with minimum spend-based free night awards up for grabs.

Hotel credit cards also offer elite status upgrades based upon hitting minimum spends. For instance, the IHG One Rewards Traveler Credit Card offers Gold Elite status when you charge $10,000 to your card within a calendar year while the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless® Credit Card offers Gold Elite status after you spend $35,000 within a calendar year.

Likewise, certain co-branded airline credit cards offer companion fares when you reach a spending requirement. For example, the British Airways Visa Signature® Card, the Aer Lingus Visa Signature® Card and the Iberia Visa Signature® Card (all issued by Chase) offer companion fares when you spend $30,000 with your card in a calendar year.

Therefore, understanding how to reach minimum spends successfully is key for your credit-card rewards strategy, whether you’re earning a welcome offer or additional minimum spend-based cardholder perk.

Important Considerations for Credit-Card Minimum Spending Requirements

Minimum spends can seem straightforward, but it’s important to understand that they have certain rules and exclusions. Failure to be aware of these rules could cost you hundreds of thousands of points.

These include the following rules:

• Annual fees don’t count toward minimum spends. If your minimum spend is $4,000 and you currently owe $4,000 on your card, you might think that you’ve reached the minimum spend. However, if part of that $4,000 includes your card’s annual fee, then you’ll need to make up the difference in spending because annual fee payments don’t count toward minimum spend requirements. The same applies for balance transfers.
• Certain purchases are excluded. Annual fees and balance transfers aren’t the only types of spending that don’t count toward minimum spends. Interest charges, purchases of traveler’s checks, purchases or reloading of prepaid cards, purchases of gift cards, person-to-person payments, cash advances, money orders, lottery tickets, casino gaming chips, race track wagers and purchases of other cash equivalents are also excluded from minimum spends.
• Spending period starts at approval, not activation. It may seem like a minor point, but your welcome offer spending window starts from the moment you’re approved, not from when you receive and activate your card. So if you receive your card a week after approval, keep in mind that that’s one week less to hit the minimum spend.
• Refunds can reduce your progress. If you make a purchase that’s later refunded, keep in mind that it won’t count toward your minimum spend.

How to Extend Your Minimum Spending Requirement Deadline

In an ideal world, you should plan and manage your expenditure in a way that ensures you reach the minimum spend on time. However, life happens and even the best of us can fail to reach a minimum spend, no matter how many spreadsheets and tracking apps we use.

In such cases, there’s no harm in contacting your bank or card issuer to ask for an extension. Here’s how to go about doing so.

Complete the Minimum Spend Requirement Before You Ask for an Extension

Before contacting your bank, it’s generally smart to complete the minimum spend requirement first.

While this may seem counterintuitive, it will make the job of the customer service representative easier and give you a greater chance of success. Instead of having to judge whether or not you’ll follow through on your spending as well as decide whether or not to grant you the bonus, the customer service agent only needs to decide on the latter. This improves your chances of success.

Think of it this way: Does a kid have a higher chance of getting what they want from their parents with a clean or a messy room? In the same way, the customer service agent can put more trust in you and your words if you’ve already completed the minimum spend.

Call the Bank and Be Honest About Your Situation

Once you’ve completed the minimum spend, contact your bank or card issuer.

You can either call or communicate via an online chat. While you may have success with an online chat, you’ll often have better chances talking directly with an agent who may have more sympathy for your situation over the phone.

It’s important to be polite and sincere. Customer service agents are far less likely to bend the rules and make exceptions for someone who is either blaming them, the bank or simply being rude.

That brings us to the next point. Don’t blame the bank for the situation, but rather bring the focus back to you and your actions to try and get sympathy.

Generally speaking, card issuers don’t have any hard and fast rules for extending welcome offer windows, so there’s no risk in trying. Hopefully, the combination of having already reached the minimum spend combined with your politeness and honesty will bring you results.

10 Credit Card Minimum Spend Tricks

If you find yourself in a pinch, struggling to reach your credit card’s minimum spend requirement, don’t lose hope. There are ways you can avoid losing out on your card’s welcome offer—or minimum spend-based cardholder perks—by being creative with your expenditure.

Here are some of the top credit card minimum spend tricks to help you secure that welcome offer or perk.

1. Pick Up the Tab

It might seem like a small thing, but picking up the bill for everyone when you dine out can help get you closer to your minimum spend. The more you dine out and the more people you share a meal with, the greater effect this method can have.

Think work lunches, date nights, birthday dinners, graduation dinners and any other types of dinners. Have your card ready to foot the bill for everyone and let them pay you back through a peer-to-peer money transfer service like Venmo or PayPal.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Expenditures Survey, the average American household spent $327.75 per month of food away from home in 2023. That’s a significant amount of spending that you can put toward your minimum spend, particularly if you’re covering the bill for others.

Dining out isn’t cheap, but the silver lining is that you’ll edge your way closer to hitting that minimum spend with every bite and sip. So if you like to wine and dine anyway, put your gustatory enthusiasm to good use and earn that welcome offer.

2. Add Your Card to All Online Shopping Accounts

Being able to shop from the comfort of your own home is one of the 21st century’s luxuries. It’s also a great way to work toward your minimum spend requirement, considering that Americans spend an average of $513 per month on online shopping, according to a study by BadCredit.org.

Adding your credit card to your Amazon account as well as to any other websites that you or other family members shop with is an easy way to make a dent in your minimum spend.

If there’s anything that you’re planning to buy in the near future—whether it’s a new lawnmower, television or home sound system—why not make the purchase now and let it count toward your minimum spend (assuming you can afford to pay it off in full when the balance is due)?

Likewise, if you do most of your grocery shopping online and haven’t yet added your credit card to your account, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to reach the minimum spend quickly. According to BLS, Americans spent $504 per month on grocery shopping, offering an excellent way to put you closer toward the minimum spend if charged to your credit card.

You also can earn points for shopping online without spending more by beginning your search through an online shopping portal, such as Rakuten. This way, you can double-dip on your earnings by activating a shopping portal offer and combining it with spending that counts toward your welcome offer—a win-win situation.

3. Ditch Your Other Cards

This point is linked to the rest, but if you’re struggling to meet a minimum spending requirement and are still using other credit cards, ditch them (at least temporarily).

Unless you have a good reason to continue using other cards—for example, you’re close to meeting another minimum spend-based perk—you should prioritize your new credit card for all spending. If that means physically removing all other credit cards from your wallet to ensure you always use the correct one, do so.

Use your credit card for everyday spending, automated recurring payments and any other expenses. Once you’ve managed to reach the minimum spend, you can begin to use your other credit cards regularly again.

4. Add an Authorized User

If you’re still struggling to meet the spending requirement despite using your credit card for everyday purchases, consider adding an authorized user.

Depending on the credit card, an authorized user may or may not be free to add. However, most credit cards offer at least a limited number of free additional users.

An authorized user will receive their own credit card which is linked to your account as the primary cardholder. All authorized user’s spending will contribute to the minimum spend and earn you points in exactly the same way as your own spending does.

Keep in mind that you’ll also be liable for paying off your authorized user’s balance at the end of every billing cycle. It’s your credit score that’s on the line, so ensure you add an authorized user whom you can trust. While you don’t always have to add family members, it can make more sense considering that you typically have many shared expenses.

If your spouse or even your children have certain expenses that you typically don’t cover, adding them as an authorized user is an easy way to let this spending contribute toward your minimum spend.

5. Pay Your Taxes

Few of us like tax season, but if you’re short of meeting a minimum spend when taxes happen to be due, charging your tax bill to your credit card is a solid way of earning a welcome offer.

If you want to optimize your rewards, you’re best off charging the exact amount you need to make up the difference in your minimum spend to your credit card and then cover the rest of your tax bill using either a different credit card or debit card.

For example, let’s say you’re $1,000 short of hitting your minimum spend of $4,000 and you decide to charge your tax bill to your credit card to make up the difference. If your tax bill is $25,000, you could either cover the entire payment using your credit card or split it across multiple cards.

IRS-approved payment providers such as payUSAtax, ACI Payment, Inc. and Pay1040 charge between 1.82% and 1.98% for credit card payments, meaning you’d pay between $18.20 and $19.20 in fees if you covered $1,000 worth of your tax bill on your credit card. You could then either use another credit card with a minimum spend-based perk to cover the rest of your tax bill or use a debit card at a flat rate of $2.14 through payUSAtax.

However, if you charged your entire $25,000 tax bill to one credit card, you’d pay between $455 and $495 in fees. You’d need to deduct these fees from the value of your rewards to work out whether you still come out on top or not.

For instance, if you earned an 80,000-point welcome offer on the first $4,000 spent and just 1X points per dollar spent on the remaining $21,000, you’d have a total of 101,000 points. If these points were worth $1,100 (1 cent apiece), their value would be almost cut in half due to the fees you’d accumulate.

Therefore, it’s important to be strategic when using your taxes to make up the difference in minimum spends and to pay only what’s necessary in fees to maximize your return value.

6. Prepay Upcoming Vacations

If you have any upcoming vacations or travel within the next year (or even the following year) that you’re planning to book with cash, prepaying your vacations is an excellent way to make up the difference in your minimum spend.

Flights, hotels and rental cars often cost at least several hundred dollars—if not a few thousand when it comes to family vacations or luxurious couples’ retreats—so putting this expense toward your minimum spend is a great way to squeeze value out of your spending.

Likewise, if you book through your card issuer’s travel portal, such as American Express Travel, Chase Travel℠ or Capital One travel booking site, you can often earn additional points on your spending, depending on which credit card you hold.

For instance, The Platinum Card® from American Express (see rates and fees) earns 5X points per dollar spent on flights (on up to $50,000 per calendar year) and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel while the Capital One Venture X Credit Card earns a whopping 10X points per dollar spent on hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One travel booking site.

So if you spent $2,000 on hotel and rental car costs through Capital One travel while trying to earn the Venture X’s welcome offer, you’d earn 20,000 points on top of putting a dent in the minimum spend—a pretty sweet deal, maximizing the return on your expenditure.

7. Prepay Bills

If it fits in your budget, prepaying bills and insurance premiums is an excellent way to make up the difference in your minimum spend.

Prepaying cell phone bills, utility bills, homeowners insurance, auto insurance, umbrella insurance and medical insurance, among other bills, enables you to leverage your natural expenditure and upcoming expenses to get you closer to your minimum spend.

Prepaying certain bills also often comes with annual billing discounts, so you could even save on your premiums in the process.

While not all merchants accept credit card payments, it doesn’t hurt to try. Likewise, you can always use a service like Plastiq (more on that next) to work around merchants who typically don’t accept credit cards.

So pay bills with your credit card for points and get closer to reaching the minimum spend.

8. Consider Plastiq for Trickier Payments

Certain vendors and merchants don’t accept credit card payments. Big recurring expenses, such as mortgage payments, rental payments or home renovation costs, offer the perfect opportunity for enabling you to meet the minimum spend, yet merchants often don’t allow credit card payments. That’s where Plastiq comes in.

Plastiq is a payment service that enables you to pay almost any bill with a credit card even if your recipient doesn’t accept credit cards. That’s because Plastiq converts your payment into an acceptable payment type—such as a wire transfer, ACH transfer or a paper check—and in return charges you a 2.9% convenience fee for this service.

To use Plastiq, you can create an account, add your credit card, input your recipient’s payment details and select the amount you want to pay. Plastiq accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club and Discover cards. Your recipient doesn’t need an account with Plastiq to accept the payment.

With the help of Plastiq, you can pay (or prepay) significant bills that can help make up the difference in your minimum spend, such as homeowners association fees, mortgage payments, rental payments, daycare and contractors fees.

However, there are two points to keep in mind when using Plastiq.

First, Plastiq comes with restrictions on certain types of payments.

The platform is designed for consumer-to-business payments and doesn’t support peer-to-peer transactions. It also restricts payments for debt products. For instance, you can’t make auto loan, student loan and mortgage payments using a Visa or American Express card through Plastiq. Likewise, American Express forbids you from paying commercial rent, escrow agreements, timeshare fees and short-term rental payments through Plastiq.

Second, you need to work out how much Plastiq’s convenience fee eats into your return in points.

For example, the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card has a typical welcome offer of 60,000 to 80,000 Ultimate Rewards points after you spend $5,000 within the first three months of card membership. If you were to spend just $4,000 through bill payment with Plastiq, you’d pay $116 worth of fees. However, if you spent just $300 on a bill through Plastiq to reach your minimum spend, you’d pay $8.70 in fees.

Given that 60,000 to 80,000 Ultimate Rewards points are worth at least $725 to $1,000 when redeemed, you’d come out on top in either case. But the more you spend through Plastiq, the further the value of your welcome offer effectively decreases.

Plastiq remains a great option when paying merchants that don’t accept credit cards and can help you reach your minimum spend when you otherwise wouldn’t. Just ensure that you’ve taken Plastiq’s convenience fee into account when calculating the value of your return.

9. Do Your Holiday and Birthday Shopping Early

Like them or not, year-end holidays and birthdays come around every year. And depending on your situation, they can come with a hefty price tag.

While you can’t pre-order your turkey or birthday cake months in advance, you can already get to work on gift shopping. If you know what you’re planning to buy someone, purchase it now and let that spending go toward your minimum spend. This is a great last-minute way to take a few hundred dollars off your minimum spend.

As a bonus, you’ll also be prepared when it comes to birthdays and the holiday season, avoiding the gift shopping rush.

10. Leave the Company Card at Home

If the company you work for has issued you an employee card for business-related spending and travel, you could check with your manager if you could charge business expenditure on your personal card.

For instance, if you have a business trip coming up between now and the end of your minimum spending window, paying for flights, hotels, transport and other travel costs could help significantly in allowing you to reach the minimum spend.

Your company could then reimburse you for these costs, making it a win-win, as you’re effectively earning points with zero spending costs.

Keep in mind that not all employers will be on board with this idea. Some companies issue their employees business travel rewards cards to earn points and miles to help offset the cost of future company-related travel. Likewise, other companies book all their employees’ travel through a central booking portal, making it difficult for you to cover the expense on a personal credit card.

That said, if you’re on good terms with your employer, it’s worth a shot to help reach the minimum spend.

Don’t Let a Missed Minimum Spend Set You Back

Just because things are looking tight, you shouldn’t give up hope—not until you’ve tried all the creative ways listed above to help you reach your minimum spend. Whether it’s prepaying bills, using Plastiq, early holiday shopping or even paying your taxes with your credit card, there’s almost always a way to make up the remaining expenditure necessary to earn your card’s welcome offer.

And if you can’t reach the minimum spend within the original timeframe, call your card issuer and ask nicely for an extension. In the worst case, they say no—in the best case, you’ll get thousands of points you’d otherwise have to forfeit.