Frequent Miler on the Air - Does being an authorized user affect your eligibility for a new credit card offer? | Question of the Week Ep9 | 7-19-26

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

Does being an authorized user affect your eligibility for a new credit card offer? Reader Mike emailed us with this question:My wife has the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card and I am an authorized user. Now, I want to apply for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card for myself. Is being an authorized user on the card you want to apply for have any consequences?We’ve been answering a reader or listener question at the end of each Frequent Miler on the Air podcast episode. Now, we’ve turned the question of the week into its own weekly episode. Tune in every Sunday at 5pm for our Question of the Week podcast. And if you have your own question you’d like to submit, you can send it to [e-mail] in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. This week's question of the week, does being an authorized user affect your eligibility for a new credit card offer? Mike, via the giant mailbag, writes in and says, My wife has the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, and I'm an authorized user. Now, I want to apply for the Chase Sapphire preferred card for myself. Will being an authorized user on the card you want to apply for have any consequences? In other words, Mike wants to know, is he eligible to get the Sapphire Preferred card for himself?

Yeah, this is a really common question, and it's understandable, because if you look through the eligibility information for the sign-up offer, if you click to sign up for the Sapphire Preferred card and look at the details of who can apply, it'll say you're not eligible if you currently have the Sapphire Preferred card. And Mike would be rightly confused by that, like thinking, do I actually have it or not? I have a card with my name on it that says Sapphire Preferred. But in this case, no, it does not impact Mike's ability to get the card new because as an authorized user, he doesn't really have the card, even though he has a card, he has a physical card with his name on it.

he doesn't really have that account. His wife has that account. And so his ability to sign up for the card is fine. Now, there are some complexities, I guess, that you need to think about, right? So Chase has this thing called, that we refer to as the 524 rule, where they usually won't approve you for a new card if you have opened. five or more cards in the past 24 months. And if you were, if, if the account you were added to as an authorized user was opened in

the last 24 months, that authorized user card that Mike has could be adding to his 524 count basically in that situation. And so if that put Mike over 524 or, you know, at or over 524, you know, at or over 5. open accounts in the past 24 months, then Chase might automatically decline that application. That said, it's a pretty easy phone call to call Chase and say, hey, one of those cards that, you know, put me over, I'm not actually responsible for that card. I'm just an authorized user. And they should be able to take that off the account and approve Mike for that card.

Yeah, assuming you meet all of the other eligibility criteria, whatever the algorithm decides, then yes, they will remove those from the account, like Greg said, if you explain to them that you're not financially responsible for those authorized user cards. So, yeah, so that's, I think, all good information to know. So when you mention the fact that being added as an authorized user might add to what I might call your auto 524 account, right? The computer will think that you're over 524. So I have an add-on question here. And that is, does it ever make sense to add your spouse? as an authorized user. Should you ever do that? Because, you know, to add a couple of things here as to why

I would ask that, you know, on consumer cards, again, it's going to add to that auto 524 count calculation. And that might be similar with other banks. Other banks have rules about how many cards you can have opened with, you know, within the past year or two years potentially. So it might impact your ability to get automatically approved for cards if you've been added as an authorized user. And, if your spouse is someone who uses Apple Pay or Google Pay or if you use those and your spouse has a card you want, oftentimes you can add the same card to both Player 1 and Player 2's digital wallets without adding them as an authorized user. So for instance, for years, the card we used in Google Pay was my Altitude Reserve card. And I just added the same card to my wife's digital wallet so that she can tap all the time.

And it was my card. But it didn't matter. She didn't have to have an authorized user card on that. So given those types of things, does it ever make sense to add your spouse as an authorized user? Yeah, I mean, just for practical reasons, there are still cases where physical cards are necessary or preferred. Like, so many restaurants in the U.S. still take away a physical card to go run it in the back. And so if you only have a digital card, I mean, most restaurants will figure out a way to let you pay, but you don't want that happening. So if your spouse is going to be at restaurants by themselves, you know, they're going to want a physical card.

So I think it makes sense from that point of view. There's also times just for whatever reason when I was in Ireland recently. One place. I used my digital wallet everywhere, but one place, and this is like, I think, goes back to a while ago when they used to have these limits, but wasn't able to do a digital tap to pay for more than 50 euros. And neither my wife or I had any physical cards with us there. So we were like, what are we going to do? But finally, the person taking the card realized, oh, I could just run two charges separately. And that worked fine. But it was like, that's wild. That's wild. Yeah. You know, well, there are other like hotels. I've had a number of hotel

check-in situations where they insisted on a card or sometimes they need to see an ID in a card somewhere and see that they match. So there are sometimes, you're right, we're having a physical card, I think, just is necessary. Right. There's also some like capabilities that get unlocked. For example, with American Express, if you want to transfer, transfer your Amex points to someone else's loyalty accounts, then that someone else needs to, have been an authorized user or have an employee card for 90 days or more. And so, you know, you might want to add them or have them add you, depending on which way you want to do those transfers as an authorized user or employee.

Chase has some similar things with their ultimate rewards cards about how you could transfer to the loyalty programs of an authorized user. So there's some things like that, that other reasons you might want to do it. There are also, of course, some cards that actually give you real benefits as an authorized user. One great example is the Ritz Carlton card where you can add authorized users for free, and each authorized user gets their own lounge benefits, like their own version of priority pass and the ability to get into Chase Sapphire Lounge. So that's an awesome situation where, obviously, if you have the ability to add authorized users,

you might as well do it. But in practice, we don't frequently do this in my household. So my wife and I are both authorized users or employee cards on Blue Business Plus cards in order to make sure that we have the ability to transfer to either person's loyalty accounts. And we both have some authorized users on our Ritz cards, the kids that have their own priority passes, just for situations where that might come in handy. So, I mean, there are a couple like that. But overall, we don't very often do this. What about you? I mean, are there many cards in your household where you have added each other as authoritative?

users, do you do that just for convenience or do you avoid it in order to avoid those counting towards 524? Mostly avoid it. And, you know, so in the cases like Amex where we want that capability, we add each other to employee cards because those don't count towards your 524. So that's an easy way of doing it there, especially with something like the Blue Business Plus that is no annual fee. So there's, you know, no downside that I can think of to do that.

This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for our giant mailbag, you can see. Send that too. Send it to mailbag at Frequentmiler.com.

Hi, I'm Mike Siegel comedian, and since 2011, host of the Travel Tales podcast. When I'm not traveling the world telling jokes for money, I'm traveling for fun out of curiosity and love of new places. And I love talking about travel with other people who share my passion. Whether they're travel experts, influencers, expats, or I'm just catching up with a fun friend, the subject is always my favorite one, travel. So if you love travel, I want to listen to other people who love travel, and maybe even laugh or learn to thing or two. Check out the Travel Tales podcast with me, your host, Mike Siegel, anywhere you get your podcasts. If you love travel, but don't always have time to plan, we've got a podcast for you.

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