Amex retention bonuses: how to get extra points every year

One of the easiest ways to increase your Avios or points balance

If you don’t ask, you don’t get. That’s the mantra around renewal bonuses or offers. Credit card companies will happily accept your membership fees every year without much of a thank you. If you’re smart and you remember to badger your card company every year, you could be adding on hundreds of thousands of extra points each time you renew.

What is a retention bonus?

This is a reward a credit card company offers you to retain you as a customer.

They are typically requested and given in the period just before your membership is due to renew for another year. The simple objective for the card company is to get you to pay for another year of membership. For the cardholder, the objective around the renewal point should be to get as many points as possible.

You can, of course, cancel a card at any time, but most card providers will not give you a rebate on any membership fees already paid. American Express, for example, used to refund you pro rata, but that stopped in 2023.

That means that once payment for another card year is taken, the card issuer has achieved value from you for the rest of the year. Paying a retention bonus to people who have already moved into their next year, and who have paid their fees, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

However, some people have reported a retention partway through their membership year if they have said that they are unhappy and are thinking of cancelling.

Unlike sign-up bonuses that are front-and-centre, retention bonuses are both highly personal to the cardholder and based on what’s happening with that card issuer at a point in time.

American Express will look at who you are and what value you offer to them, and also take into account how they view the market. Do they need to work harder at the moment to retain more customers? If so, you’ll see healthier retention offers. Has this been a good or a bad month in terms of retrining

The concept of a retention bonus applies to any card company, but in the UK, it’s really only relevant to Amex. I asked Barclaycard about a retention bonus, and they didn’t even understand the concept of it. After I explained what it was, they said that they don’t offer this. Capital On Tap (business cards only) does not do retention bonuses.

The best story to tell

Should you feign deep unhappiness with the credit card company to get the best retention bonus? I’m a little weary of making faux goodbyes, having done so many times with Sky to get them to reduce their bills. It feels a little grubby.

My approach the last few times with Amex has been to simply say that I have a renewal coming up, and what are the current retention offers? It’s easy for me, easy for them, and it’s given me what I wanted: some points if I remain with Amex.

I do this over livechat, meaning it’s a ten-minute task I can complete whilst watching TV. Amex have an excellent customer support team, and in the last ten years, they’ve only let me down once.

I see retention bonuses as a reward for continued loyalty, not a bribe to stop me from moving somewhere else. That makes the negotiation more honest and, frankly, much easier.

Having said that, here are a few pointers if you want to make it clear to Amex that you’re thinking of leaving and you want to tug on the heartstrings a little.

• Mention the card’s annual fee and how you are struggling to justify it, especially if fees have increased since you last paid them.
• If you’re not based in London, mention that: most Amex perks are focused on the capital. Most perks and a reasonable number of the retailer offers that you get are London-centric.
• If you have an Avios collecting Barclaycard, you could mention that you’re thinking of swapping your spend to this. The introduction of that card a few years ago added some much-needed competition.
• You could also mention that you’re travelling less, positioning the card as being less useful and providing a lower value. This is an easy one for us as we’re struggling to use our 2-4-1 vouchers.

What type of retention bonus could you get from Amex?

There’s a link between the annual fee and the size of the bonus. The spend levels you put through the card can also dictate what’s offered, as well as how eager Amex are to retain customers at that point in time.

My last retention offer was just a few weeks ago on a Business Platinum card. I was offered 40,000 Membership Reward points if I hit £10,000 of spend over three months. Given that we normally spend £20k – £30k a month on this card, this was a great offer, and we hit it in just over a week. Amex, of course, knew our spend levels. The ease at which we could hit that

I’ve created the table below to act as a guide on what you could get. This was created by scraping mentions of UK retention bonuses online and then creating averages. You may get more, or less, but you’re more likely to see the ranges below.

Will you be guaranteed a retention offer?

No. Whilst it’s common, sometimes nothing is offered.

This could be down to either your personal situation (you have one of the free cards, or you have a low monthly spend) or just the time of the year for Amex. It’s worthwhile checking in at a later date; it does appear that offers can be dynamic, and even checking in a week later can give you a different response.

How do you find out your renewal date?

Amex don’t make it easy to see what month your membership renews. Most of their cards will have the year in which you became a member, but not the month, printed on the front. THeir excellent online portal doesn’t give you that information when you log in, either.

Instead, have a look at your statement, which you can download through the portal.

• Login to the Amex portal
• Click Statements & Activity in the navigation at the top
• Click Statements on the left-hand side
• Click to download your most recent statement as PDF.
• Within the first or second page you should see “Next Cardmembership Fee Date”.
  • On my BA Premium Plus statement, it was on the second page, towards the top
  • On my BA Gold Business statement, it was on the first page, towards the middle.

Don’t miss your date

It’s much harder to get a retention offer after your card renews for another year, so look up your renewal date and pop a calendar item in a month before your renewal. If you have multiple cards it can be tricky staying on top of multiple renewal dates, so those reminders are key to maximising the points you get every year.

You never know what you’ll get as a retention bonus, and if you don’t ask, then you’re leaving points on the table. When you start adding up the points you could earn each year, if you have multiple cards and you stay with Amex for many years, it starts to become significant.

Are Membership Reward points as good as Avios?

If you have a non-branded card (i.e. an Amex Gold or Amex Platinum) then any points given to you as part of a retention bonus will be Membership Reward points.

You can swap these to Avios at a 1:1 rate. 1,000 Membership Reward points can be transferred to 1,000 Avios.

You can also swap them to other airlines. That’s what, in my opinion, makes MR points better than the Avios you would get via one of the BA cards. You can use MR points for BA flights if you need to, or utilise another airline.

Our approach to using points for travel has changed significantly in the last few years, thanks to MR points. We’ve flown Emirates First, Etihad The Residence, and Singapore First. None of those flights would have been possible if we had just collected Avios.