What actually counts toward a credit card's minimum spend — and when issuers can take the bonus back

Your welcome bonus isn't fully "yours" the moment your online account shows you crossed the spend threshold. Card issuers write their own rules for what counts toward that threshold in the first place — and separate rules for when they can still take an already-posted bonus back. None of this is set by federal law the way your APR disclosure or billing-error rights are; it's a matter of contract, and the two biggest issuers spell it out plainly in their own terms. Here's what Chase and American Express actually say.

What counts toward the spend requirement — and what doesn't

Every welcome offer comes with two numbers: a dollar amount you have to spend, and a window of time to spend it in. Chase's own consumer-education page gives a typical example — "50,000 bonus points for spending $3,000 over the first three months" — but that's illustrative, not universal. Your card's actual offer sets its own amount and window, and you'll find both in the offer terms you agreed to when you applied.

What's easy to miss is that not every dollar you put on the card counts. Chase's own page states plainly: "certain fees and costs such as foreign transaction fees, balance transfers, balance transfer fees, annual fees and cash advances might be excluded in what counts as spending to earn the sign-up offer." In practice, that means loading up on balance transfers or taking a cash advance to hit your number faster doesn't work the way a regular purchase does — those categories are commonly carved out, and the card's own fees (including the annual fee itself) typically don't count as spending either.

There's a separate eligibility wrinkle worth knowing before you apply at all: Chase notes you "may not be eligible to earn the sign-up bonus if you're re-opening an account that you had previously closed" — so churning the same product to farm a second bonus isn't a given, and issuers track that.

When an issuer can take the bonus back

Hitting the spend threshold and seeing the bonus post to your account isn't necessarily the end of the story. American Express's own welcome-offer terms describe conditions under which it can decline to credit the bonus, freeze it, or take it away after the fact — grouped under the umbrella of "abuse, misuse, or gaming" of the offer. The terms name three specific examples:

• Applying for a card to get an offer "we did not intend for you" — Amex's own catch-all language for offers targeted at a specific audience or channel.
• Canceling or downgrading the account within 12 months of opening it. This is the one that catches the most people off guard: earning the bonus and closing the card shortly after isn't treated as a completed transaction the way it might feel — Amex's terms explicitly tie the 12-month mark to bonus eligibility.
• Canceling or returning purchases made to meet the spending threshold. If you buy something specifically to hit your number and then return it, Amex's terms allow the bonus tied to that spending to be reversed along with it.

That specific language comes from a live Amex welcome-offer terms page (a small-business card offer, used here as a representative example of Amex's standard welcome-offer boilerplate). Amex's own consumer and business card offers commonly carry versions of this same structure, but the exact wording, dollar figures, and windows are set per offer — so this is an illustration of how the clawback mechanism works, not a claim that every Amex card uses identical language.

Why this isn't a federal rule

Nothing here comes from the CARD Act or Regulation Z the way your APR disclosure or minimum-payment warning does. A welcome bonus is a marketing offer layered on top of the card agreement, and the issuer writes its own terms for both earning and forfeiting it. That's exactly why the specifics vary — one issuer's exclusion list or closure window can differ from another's, and an issuer can change future offers' terms without changing the CARD Act protections that actually are federally required.

What to actually do

• Read your specific offer's terms before you start spending toward it, not after — the exclusion list (fees, transfers, cash advances) and the exact spend window are set per offer, not standardized industry-wide.
• Don't plan to close or downgrade the card the moment you clear the bonus. If your issuer's terms include a closure/downgrade window like Amex's 12-month example, closing early risks the bonus you just earned, not just future rewards.
• Don't buy-and-return to pad your spend total. Issuers that write clawback language for this scenario can and do reverse the associated bonus.
• Treat a reopened, previously-closed account as a maybe, not a given, for bonus eligibility — check the current offer terms rather than assuming the bonus is available to you again.

None of this changes whether a given bonus is worth chasing in the first place — that's a separate math question about whether the bonus outweighs the annual fee at your real spending pattern, and a different mechanic from what happens to points that are already sitting in your account. ClearValue Cards doesn't issue cards or set any bonus terms — we're a publisher and card-matching quiz. If you're comparing welcome offers and want to see which one actually fits how you spend, take the quiz and find your match.