One of the biggest questions I’ve gotten this past year is what in the **** is a Bilt card? It’s a justified question: their ads are everywhere from airports to subways, and they’ve quickly become one of the hottest credit cards on the market.
In my opinion they very much deserve the hype. I was a skeptic when I first heard of the card, but their team continues to deliver tremendous value. Here’s a few reasons why Bilt has quickly reached the top of my card stack.
Points on Rent
The marquee benefit of Bilt is the ability to earn 1x points on rent without paying the credit card transaction fees. Technically, you can earn 1x points on rent on many other cards too (rent would just fall in the “other” purchases category) but you’d have to pay a ~3% transaction fee, which wouldn’t be worth it in most cases. Bilt lets you bypass those fees and feasibly earn points on your rent. If you’re living in a typical US metro area, you’ll easily earn tens of thousands of free points per year this way! Given this is the only card product on the market that does this, it’s natural to have some questions:
“So wait are they just fronting the transaction fee?”: Nope, Bilt spins up a special bank account that has your rent preloaded, and you use that to pay for your rent instead of your personal bank account. Your online rent payment portal will omit the standard credit card fee since you’re technically paying via bank transfer, and Bilt will charge you for the debited amount.
“What if I don’t have an online rent portal?”: Bilt can send a check, PayPal, or Venmo to your landlord. This requires a bit of one-time setup, but you’ll earn points all the same. They don’t support Zelle yet unfortunately.
“What if I Venmo my share of the rent to my roommate? How about subletting?”: Bilt can handle this too. You can set your special Bilt bank account as a payment option in Venmo and use that to pay your roommate. Bilt may ask for lease verification if you go this route though, which means YMMV for sublet situations.
“Any catch?”: You need to use your Bilt card 5x a month to earn points on rent, but that’s about it! As you’ll see below, you’ll want to use it way more than that anyway.
The card isn’t just a one trick pony, and you’ll also earn 3x points on dining and 2x on travel. The dining multiplier rivals the best cards on the market, but that travel multiplier is middle of pack; I’d use other premium travel cards like the Amex Platinum card to book travel if you have them.
Surprisingly Good Transfer Partners
Cool, so you can earn points on rent, but that’s only worth something if the points are useful. As we discussed in Issue 1, points are only as good as their transfer partners, and honestly, I’ve been shocked by how good the list is for Bilt:
That’s a pretty impressive list. Here’s some highlights:
Bilt is the ONLY card program that transfers to American. Oneworld loyalists rejoice! Also, American has been putting up some impressively cheap award tickets for Asia travel lately, but more on that in a future issue.
Bilt also covers United, which makes them the only card program that partners with 2 major US airlines. If you’re also sitting on an Amex, note that this gives you direct point transfers to the full US trifecta: United, American, and Delta.
I’ve written about Air France/KLM before, and it’s a fantastic program for dirt cheap Europe trips. Air Canada, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic are also fantastic for a whole variety of partner awards, and I’ll certainly write about them soon. Most major card programs are partnered with these four airlines though, so this isn’t a unique benefit.
Turkish Airlines and Avianca are stellar options for rare but super high value redemptions within Star Alliance. If you’re curious, you can learn how I saved 70k-90k points using these programs for an EWR-LHR trip, and how I used Turkish to fly cross country for a mere 7.5k miles. Turkish isn’t partnered with Amex or Chase, and Avianca isn’t partnered with Chase, so if you’re holding these cards, Bilt helps round out your transfer partner portfolio.
Honestly, their BizDev team must be doing the most. I’ve personally been very invested in the Chase ecosystem, yet I’ve found myself spending more on Bilt lately because Bilt has access to killer partners I just don’t have on Chase.
Rent Day Promotions
Paying your landlord isn’t typically something to celebrate, but Bilt makes the first of the month a little sweeter with their “Rent Day” bonuses. Every Rent Day, Bilt provides some wildly good deal or transfer bonus or status trial that’s usually hard or even impossible to find otherwise. Here’s some examples from the past:
Up to 150% transfer bonuses for frequent flyer programs like Air France/KML Flying Blue, Emirates Skywards, and Virgin Atlantic Flying Club.
Up to 18x on restaurants partnered with Bilt (more on that below).
Complimentary United Silver or Gold status for 120 days, with the potential to retain it for a full year.
90 day free trial of World of Hyatt Explorist status, Hyatt’s 2nd best status tier providing complimentary room upgrades and late checkouts.
Transfer bonuses of 150% are absolutely unprecedented in the points world; usually people would rejoice over a 30% transfer bonus on the other major card programs. And re: the restaurant points boost, I have a friend who put his Bilt card down on a $750 friends’ dinner and walked away with a whopping 12k points — a free cross-country flight right there.
(Note that some bonuses scale with your Bilt status tier. I won’t get into it this time, but Bilt has their own status program and you earn status based on the points you’ve earned. But even the entry-level tier got 75% transfer bonuses; still an insane deal.)
Bilt is perhaps the most gamified, content-forward, and youthful of the Big 5 credit card programs, and as such they have some fun Rent day programming too:
Point Quest: A trivia show where you earn up to 250 points for answering current events questions. (They also release their content on TikTok!)
HQ Trivia is back, but with points?? RentFree: A Family Feud-style game show where you enter a drawing to get your rent paid for by Bilt.
Complimentary spots at local SoulCycle classes.
All spend categories (besides rent) earn double points! Dining goes from 3x to 6x, Travel goes from 2x to 4x, and all other non-rent spending goes from 1x to 2x.
Bilt Dining
Bilt has partnered with a whole variety of restaurants in major US metro cities, and you’ll earn anywhere from 2x to 10x extra points per dollar when you dine there. That’s on top of the 3x points you earn from any dining transaction on your Bilt.
One of the coolest parts of this program is you don’t even need to use your Bilt card; you can register other cards you own into your “Bilt Wallet” and you’ll still earn the extra Bilt points!
I’ve registered my Chase Sapphire Reserve in my Bilt Wallet. Now let’s say I go eat at one of my new favorite NYC spots, 8282 in Lower East Side. 8282 is listed as a +3x Bilt Dining partner. I’ve got two options to earn points on my meal:
As you can see, Bilt Dining affords you flexibility on how you earn points on your nights out, which can be very useful as you try to build up points balances in multiple programs.
You can see the full list of Bilt Dining restaurants here. Bilt Dining has restaurants in many major cities like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, and more, but I will say that some cities definitely have a more developed list of restaurant choices.
Also, as of yesterday it’s officially NYC restaurant week, and there’s plenty of Bilt Dining restaurants on the list right now! If you’ve already got the card, there’s a whole list of them in the app.
Bilt Experiences
Many major credit card programs technically offer “exclusive experiences” for cardholders, but it’s often hard to access these, and they’re typically quite niche. Bilt has a significantly better experience program with events you’ll likely want to go to. In the past, they’ve offered unique dining experiences and even box tickets at NFL games bookable on points.
I went to one of their events in November at Meduza, an up-and-coming mediterranean restaurant that had literally just opened a few days prior! It was a lovely 5 course menu with a cocktail pairing, and the vibes were excellent. They had all the guests sit on a long table together, so everyone got to socialize and become friends while drinking way too much. Plus they had some of the Bilt team at the event too, and I got to ask a bunch of my prying questions about the card.
The dining experiences were bookable in the Bilt app for $150/seat or 12,500 Bilt points; I personally opted for the former because I know I can extract more than 1.2¢ of value per point. They’ve also run dining experiences in Miami, Dallas, and Boston.
I’m not personally the biggest football fan, but back in September, they also let cardholders book spots in a box suite for a Jets vs. Chiefs game. The cost was just 10k Bilt points — given that a typical box suite goes from $5-25k for 20 people, this was quite the steal! Plus apparently Taylor Swift attended that game to cheer on Travis Kelce, so who knows, you could have bumped into her at the stadium too.
Peace of Mind + Protections
Because the Bilt card is also a World Elite Mastercard, you get some additional travel protections for peace of mind:
Auto rental collision damage waiver: Rent a car and you can decline the extra collision insurance from the rental company.
Trip delay reimbursement: If your trip gets delayed 6+ hrs, they’ll help cover costs.
Trip cancellation protection: If your trip gets cancelled due to medical reasons, they’ll reimburse you even for non-refundable plans.
Cellphone protection: If you pay your phone bill with Bilt, they’ll pay you if you phone gets destroyed or stolen.
Purchase protection: Buy something recently and it got destroyed or stolen? Bilt will reimburse you.
I’m being a bit vague on the exact terms and reimbursements deliberately, since that deserves its own post. Most travel-focused cards have these protections too, but not all protections are created equal. The devil tends to be in the details, and having reviewed the fine print myself, I’ll say Bilt is probably below average in terms of the quality of these protections. Still, something is better than nothing, but if you’ve got cards like a Chase Sapphire or Capital One VentureX, I’d rely more on those protections instead. I’ll do a proper deep dive that compares the different cards and their protections in a future issue.
Best Part: $0 Annual Fee
All of this comes for a $0 annual fee, which is honestly a bit wild. This makes it a super friendly “first travel card” for beginners, and an easy addition for experts.
My Verdict
Friends have been asking me for years about the best card to start travel hacking with, and I used to say the Chase Sapphire Preferred. While that’s still an awesome card, it has a $95 annual fee, and Bilt is free with amazing benefits and partners to boot. I would highly recommend this card for beginners, but as I discussed above, there’s plenty of perks even for seasoned veterans. Even if you don’t pay rent, the rent day bonuses and transfer partners alone make the card worth it.
The card is definitely targeted towards younger generations living in major US metro cities, which is a refreshing positioning compared to some of the other cards. If you’re based in NYC, Bilt has an especially strong presence here (they’re based here after all), but you’ll also get a decently fulfilling set of perks and benefits on Bilt Dining and Bilt Experiences in other major US cities.
From a business perspective, I’m also generally amazed at how fast their team has been building and how they’ve carved out a growing wedge in an otherwise oligopolized market run by legacy players. More than other cards, they’ve been focusing a lot on strategic partnerships that lend the card more utility, revenue streams, and virality. I have to imagine Bilt has identified fairly diverse revenue streams given their $0 fee strategy. This all means there’s likely more to come with this card!
If you do decide to get a Bilt, I would appreciate if you use my referral link below! It gets me some extra points which I can use to travel more and power more issues of Shreycation. I only provide this because Bilt is a product I’m personally a huge fan of (can you tell?), and I hope you enjoy it too!
(Disclaimer: This post is not financial advice and you should do your own research to ensure this card is right for you, and that you have a reasonable chance of being accepted. Applying will likely affect your credit score. I’ll do a post later with tips on getting and maintaining high credit scores to maximize your chances of getting good cards and getting high limits.)
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Great article Shrey! I'm new to the points game and wanted to clarify a few things you mentioned.
My understanding is that for people who are starting travel hacking, Bilt is not a great card because there is no signup bonus, which, if your goal is to travel hack, is how you will rack up most of your points. My thinking is that it's best to get Bilt and use it for rent, and for your minimum 5 transactions each moth, and then after that to put all your spend on cards you are trying to get signup bonuses for. My thinking is that if I have $5K to spend, even with the crazy Bilt transfer bonuses, it doesn't compare to getting 75K or 100K points from a signup.