Amex Business Card Offer: Earn up to 25K points with employee cards (targeted)

American Express has brought back another promotion for adding employee/authorized user cards to Business Platinum accounts: 5,000 Membership Rewards points after $2K in purchases in the first 6 months on each employee card (up to 25,000 bonus points total).

Employee card offers have come and gone over the last couple of years in various permutations, and this offer isn’t the best that we’ve seen (that was 20K/card).

That said, it’s worth noting that even folks with new business cards can add employee cards and the spend on those employee cards will count as minimum spend towards the welcome offer…effectively allowing for a double dip.

The Deal

• Get 5,000 Membership Rewards points after $2K spend in the first 6 months for each employee card added to a Business Platinum card from American Express (up to 5 employee cards or 25,000 bonus points max)
• Promotion is targeted (see links below to find out if your card is targeted and to register)

Direct Link to Offer (Business Platinum cardholders)

Quick Thoughts

The terms indicate that you can only get the bonus for the first five additional cardholders you add that spend $2K (we’ve seen offers in the past where the bonus is extended to up to 99 authorized user cards). This is a decent deal on its own, but it’s more useful when meeting minimum spend on a new card.

Let’s say that you sign-up for a Business Platinum card with the referral bonus of 150,000 Membership Rewards points after $15K in spend (this is what’s listed on our best offers page). Instead of spending directly on the card, you could add five authorized user cards. The spend on those authorized user cards will count towards the $15K minimum spend.

After meeting the $2k on each card and spending an additional $5K to meet minimum spend, you’d end up with 165K from the platinum (150K from the welcome offer and 15k points from the $15,000 in spend). You’d also get the 5K bonus on each of the five employee cards for an additional 25k total. All told, you’d end up with 190,000 Membership Rewards after $15,000 in spend.

Note that there’s several different types of employee cards, including a fee-free “Employee Business Expense Card,” which looks like an Amex Green card. All of them count towards the promo, so there’s no need to add additional annual fees.

In the past, Amex has been fairly loosey-goosey about what it allows for authorized users and whether or not they make any attempt to verify that it is an actual person…there’s some pretty crazy stories out there. Of course, your mileage (and your tolerance for that sort of thing) may vary.

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