How soon can you refer others for Chase cards?

Recently, my wife opened a couple of new Chase cards — including a Chase Marriott Rewards Premier card and a Chase Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Premier card. Part of the reason she opened the Southwest card was because one of the ways to earn Southwest Companion Pass qualifying points is by referring friends for the Southwest cards. We hoped that at some point down the road, she would get referral links.

But how soon would she be able to refer friends for the card? I really didn’t know the answer to that question, but I figured it would be a while. After all, I checked the Chase Refer-a-Friend site for years and never had a referral offer on any of my Chase cards until earlier this year.

Referrals are great for couples

Playing the game in 2-player mode has its advantages as you can rack up extra points and keep them all in the family. This year, I was able to refer my wife for her own Ink Business Preferred card as well as an Amex SPG Business card, netting us an additional 20K Ultimate Rewards and 7.5K SPG points on top of the signup bonuses (though the SPG points have been slow in posting and I haven’t actually received them yet….I expect I will).

I recently referred my wife for the 80K Marriott offer because we would earn at least 103K total Marriott points between the two of us (83K for her between the signup bonus/required spend + 20K for me) for just $3K spend. Greg recently wrote a post comparing the two current Marriott card offers and the SPG card offers (See: The Marriott 120K offer [Targeted]: Is it any good?) For us, with the extra 20K points from the referral, the 80K offer made more sense.

Since I already had the Marriott card, one of the reasons my wife wanted to open that card is to have two free night certificates between us. It makes sense for both partners to have the card, and to open it around the same time of year, so that you will have 2 annual free night certificates to put together a pair of free nights at one of the Best Marriotts in the US to spend your free nights or one of the Top 5 Cat 5 Marriotts in the world.

So how soon after approval can you refer friends?

But what if neither you nor your partner have a Marriott card and you’d like to both open a card of your own? If one partner opened the card today, how long would he or she have to wait to refer friends and family?

The answer appeared in an email a few days after my wife received her new Marriott card:

I couldn’t believe she would be eligible that quickly, so I told her to go to the Chase Refer-a-Friend site…..and sure enough, she had a referral link:

I was pretty pleasantly surprised — no time like the present to get started on picking up a referral or two, especially since the cap on points earned from referrals (100K on this card) is calculated per calendar year, so there’s still a little time left for her to pick up a referral or two before 2017 is over.

At that point, I figured she ought to check on her Southwest Airlines Premier card, which she had opened at the same time. Sure enough, she had a referral link for that one, too:

She had actually also opened a Chase Southwest Business card. She was obviously on a hot streak at this point, so I wasn’t going to slow her down. She put in her info to get a referral link for her Southwest Business card……….and the party ended.

Oh well — in the immortal wisdom of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain’t bad.

Bottom line

If you’ve recently opened a Chase card, don’t forget to periodically check for referral offers. I assumed you had to be in the system for months before you’d get a referral offer — but at least in my wife’s case, she had referral links on a couple of cards within two weeks of approval. That’s something I’ll consider in the future if we both think about applying for the same card around the same time.

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