American Express has brought back another promotion for adding employee/authorized user cards to Blue Business Plus, Business Gold and Business Platinum accounts: 15,000 Membership Rewards points after $4K in purchases in the first 6 months on each employee card (up to 75,000 bonus points total).
This promo comes and goes periodically, with a new round of folks targeted every few months or so.
Employee card offers have come and gone over the last couple of years in various permutations, but this offer matches the best that we’ve seen. 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 15,000 Membership Rewards points after $4K spend in the first 6 months for each employee card added to a Business Platinum, Business Gold or Blue Business Plus card from American Express (up to 5 employee cards or 75,000 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)
Direct Link to Offer (Business Gold cardholders)
Direct Link to Offer (Blue Business Plus cardholders)
You must log-in to find out if you’re targeted. If the offer then shows as expired when you try to add cards or you get the following screen, it’s no soup for you:
Terms and Conditions
- The maximum points you can earn through this offer is 75,000 Membership Rewards® points.
- Employee Card Members can be added at different times but must be added by 12/31/2024 at 11:59 ET to be eligible for this offer.
- Purchases made by other Employee Card Members on your Account will not count toward an Employee Card Member’s Threshold Amount.
- Purchases made by eligible Employee Card Members will not be combined to satisfy the Threshold Amount. Your purchases as the Basic Card Member will not count toward an Employee Card Member’s Threshold Amount.
- Eligible purchases do NOT include fees or interest charges, purchases of traveler’s checks, purchases or reloading of prepaid cards, purchases of gift cards, person-to-person payments or purchases of other cash equivalents. Your Card Account must not be past due or canceled at the time of fulfillment of any offers.
Quick Thoughts
The terms indicate that you can only get the bonus for the first five additional cardholders you add and spend $4K (we’ve seen offers in the past where the bonus is extended to up to 99 authorized user cards). This is a great deal, but it’s especially useful when meeting minimum spend on a new card.
Let’s say that you sign-up for a Business Gold card with the referral bonus of 200,000 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 four authorized user cards (I’d actually go ahead and do five, but just for sake of argument let’s say four). The spend on those authorized user cards will count towards the $15K minimum spend. After meeting the $4k on each card you’d end up with 216K from the Gold (200K from the welcome offer and 16k points from the $16,000 in spend). You’d also get the 15K bonus on each of the four employee cards for an additional 60k total. All told, you’d have 276,000 Membership Rewards after $16,000 in spend. Wowza.
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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Does it have to be the AU cards with the annual fee or can it be the free ones?
DP:
I got many immediate family and myself AU cards for multiple accounts over multiple years but for the last 3/4 months every application is turned down and recon/customer service tells me only ONE AU card per person per account is now being enforced.
Getting 40 AU cards in my name for a long closed Biz Plat might have set something off, but Customer Service assured me in advance that that was explicitly allowed at the time.
30 plus year history with Amex, btw
No dice across three Biz cards. I have a lesser offer of 7000 points for $4K spend on the Biz Platinum in my AMEX Offers tab. Not too keen on that since the return won’t be high enough to justify moving spend from a 3X or 4X category on another card.
I upgraded my AMEX Biz Gold to AMEX biz Platinum last week (thanks Nick for the heads up!), just activated my card today. How long does it take to show up in the list of eligible cards? I only see my 2 existing BBP, not my old AMEX Biz Gold or my new AMEX Biz Plat.
I will give it a day or 2 to see if the new AMEX Biz Plat shows up in the drop down list of eligible cards.
I have been in this situation for a few months – my biz plats show in the drop down, but the biz gold that I’ve had for almost 3 months does not
AMEX requires a legitimate social security to add an AU – looks to me they don’t allow fictitious AU’s?! AMEX also specifies on my offer that the points can only be earned by adding an AU/AF card, not the business/no AF card.
With needing a social security number to activate the card how do you approach family and friends to get the socials?
If I signed up for a sole prop with 1 employee (me) can I still take advantage of this offer?
As long as you’re targeted, for sure.
My offer states there’s a 95 annual fee for the first 5 employee cards and 95 each additional card. Is that what you have as well?
I’m targeted for my Business Gold card but don’t see anything in the terms that indicates Employee Business Gold card required or Employee Business Expense card excluded. Can anyone confirm this bonus offer will work for the zero fee expense card?
Did you ever find out?
Yes, The 15k MR bonus paid out on five of the free Employee Business Expense cards. Took about week for the points to show up once I hit the $4k in spend on each card.
All three offer pages work when logged in, however, when I click “add employee cards” it takes me to my Blue Plus card page. The URL even includes “bplat-ec-15-calc-7-24” but is always the Blue Plus. Is there something I can do to get the Biz Gold or Plat to pull up so I can actually add cards? Does anyone else have this happen?
It just means your BIz Gold and Biz Plat cards aren’t targeted, so there’s nothing you can do. These front end links all go to the same application ID so you’ll get a list of the whole mix of cards targeted regardless of which front end link you use.
Amex employee cards are confusing with Employee card vs. Employee Expense card. The TOC doesn’t say the Expense card isn’t ineligible for the bonus. Does this mean spending on the no-annual-fee Expense cards will get the bonus?
Does anyone know if the 75K max is per card or per Membership Rewards account? If I’ve got multiple cards eligible for the offer, can I get up to 75K per eligible card?
“The maximum points you can earn through this offer is 75,000 Membership Rewards® points.”
Is the “offer” a per-card offer or a per-account offer?
It’s per card. If you have multiple cards targeted, you can get 75k on each of them.
Brilliant–thanks! Don’t want to push my luck, but my main card also has an Amex offer that is 5k extra MR for $5k+ in spend, up to 3 times. I’m guessing that if the spend is on an employee card, it would not trigger the Amex offer? The terms seem to suggest it’s tied the specific card, but it’s not entirely clear.
Said another way, do employee cards individually each get their own Amex offers that are tied to those specific cards? I have never actually added an employee card & have no clue.
I was recently sent the e-mail for the smaller 5K MR for 2K spend but figured I would try this one for the 15K offer anyway – unfortunately I am indeed “soup-less”. Going have to settle for the smaller offer. The struggle!
Links now taking to “page not found” – is this dead?
Yep, these links are. There probably will be new links floating around soon.
I just chatted with Amex on 2 AU cards I received through the Blue Business link. The welcome offers shown on both cards are spend $4,000 receive 7,000 MR, not 15,000 MR as is shown in the offer. I’m told it will take the back office 6-8 weeks to investigate…
I only got 7k too. Did this ever get resolved? I’ll probably just take my 7k and move on rather than draw attention to my account.