Capital One “Rewards miles” post w/ purchase (no waiting for statement)

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With the recent enhancements to Capital One’s Rewards miles programs (with the Capital One® Venture® Rewards Credit Card and Capital One® Spark® Miles for Business cards), which now transfer to airline miles, can be combined easily with your other miles-earning cards or even with other Capital One customers, and might even make these cards even better than the old SPG cards), I’ve been putting more spend on my Capital One cards than I had in years. That led me to discover something interesting and relatively unique about Capital One: rewards miles post with your purchases. That is to say that you don’t need to wait until your statement cuts to receive a lump of miles from your month’s purchases, but rather the miles post and are available as soon as your purchases move from “pending” to posted”. That could be useful if you find yourself very close to a valuable redemption — just make your necessary purchases and you should have the miles in a few days.

a screenshot of a credit card

For example, these were a couple of purchases from last Thursday, December 13th. As of Monday, December 17th you can see that the Expedia purchase, for $52.21, earned 104 miles and the Rite Aid purchase for $17.26 earned 35 miles (these purchases were with a Capital One Venture Rewards card, though the earn rate would be the same with a Capital One Spark Miles business card. The statement does not cut for a couple of weeks yet, but these purchases have already posted to the rewards account and are available to be redeemed towards travel or transferred to airline partners.

a white background with a black line

My most recent purchase to post was from Friday, and I noticed yesterday (on Sunday) that it had already posted, so the turnaround time is quite quick.

That can be particularly useful since Capital One transfers to airline partners are allowed in 100-mile increments. If you’re just a few miles short of a valuable redemption, you could make a small purchase or two and expect that the miles should post in just a couple of days. YMMV of course — it is certainly possible for Capital One to change or restrict this, but I thought it could be a useful piece of wisdom to keep in mind.

If you’re looking to see your recent activity, you can click where it says “Rewards miles” in red above. Then click “Rewards history” as seen below.

a man and woman hugging

That will show your posted transactions.

I’m not sure what the timeline is for the posting of the welcome bonuses as it has been a while since we last earned one. I wouldn’t expect those bonuses to post mid-cycle, but neither would I be surprised if they did.

Overall, this is really just something to keep in mind if you find yourself just shy of an award as it is pretty easy to top up.

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Janice

I hit a minimum spend on 12/18 and had the 50k bonus post on 12/19.

miafll

CapOne posts earned / bonus miles after charges posted. Been like this since the day of Million Miles Match offer almost 10 years ago (the sign up bonus varied based on how many miles in your qualified FFP account with the maximum being 100,000, i.e. $1000 worth) – that was when they introduced Venture.

I believe Barclays’ cards post the same way.

Christian

I’d avoid the term enhancement. Too many negative connotations from programs trying to make you believe that horrible changes are really awesome.

king

More commissions mean even the worst prog will become best. As for churners are concerned , cap one is a waste of 3 hard pulls.

Chris

Been this way for quite a while – rewards post when the purchase posts.

Greg The Frequent Miler

The reason this is now very interesting is that it’s a really quick way of getting airline miles that you might need for an award now that capital one added the ability to transfer rewards miles to airline miles.

Joel

My 75,000 bonus posted last week as soon as I met the spending requirement.

Josh

MPX also posts right away