Capital One Tightens their Credit Card Churning Rules

Capital One has tightened their rules regarding approving multiple credit cards at the same time and won’t allow more than one card per six months.

Background

Capital One has always been something of an anomaly; they don’t seem to care much about good credit scores and things like that, but they have weird things that trouble them like “too few revolving account” and other things that don’t always add up.

They also pull all 3 credit bureaus.

The one good thing about Capital One was that they didn’t have any rules against approving multiple cards at once. If you were deemed worthy in their eyes – that’s a big “if” – you could potentially get 2 or more cards on the same day. And even two of the same card on the same day, e.g. two Venture’s.

Capital One also has some nice signup bonus offers, such as $400 with Venture personal credit card or $500 with Spark business card.

Changes

Recent reports indicate that Capital One now tightened the rules of how often they’ll approve credit cards, and they now consider multiple applications as “duplicates.” They won’t process the second application at all, and no hard pull is done.

Not only are doubles of the same card considered duplicates, but even two different cards are considered duplicates, and even one personal and one business, apparently.

You can still get seconds of a card that you already have (e.g. if you got a Venture last year, you can get it a year later), but you have to wait a while before applying for it.

Data Points

Report #1

One report is from a friend who got a Spark and a Venture back in March, then applied for two different versions of Spark three months later in June. Capital One didn’t even process the applications at all since they were flagged as duplicates…three months after his previous application round.

there is currently a pending or recently processed application with Capital One

No hard pull was done, as mentioned in the letter from Capital One (below) and confirmed by my friend. The computer system automatically knew not to process the application at all.

My friend spoke to a rep who confirmed that there is a new 1/6 rule, and you can only apply for a card once per 6 months. She suggested that he apply again in September. (Since the application wasn’t processed at all, the clock wouldn’t reset with the denied application.)

Here’s the denial letter from Capital One.

Report #2

The other report is from Milesperday who also applied for Spark Cash and Spark Miles. The second application was denied as a duplicate.

He was able to get a second Spark card of the same variety that he already had from a year earlier, but he wasn’t able to push through two applications on the same day for two different versions of the Spark card.

Report #3

In the comments to this post, Leon reports applying for two business cards and one personal card. Only the first application (Spark Cash) got approved, the others were considered duplicates.

This indicates that you can’t even apply for one personal and one business card at the same time. Presumably, you’ll have to wait six months between any applications, and staggering personal and business doesn’t help. In my opinion, this makes no sense to limit personal and business combined, but I don’t work for Capital One. 🙂

See the comments of this post for additional data points.

Current Rules

Updated the rules to reflect what we learned in the comments

Here are the current Capital One churning rules as I understand them:

• You can only apply for one Capital One credit card per six months. We’ll call this the 1/6 rule.
• All credit cards are included in this rule, both personal card and business cards. For example, if you apply for the Venture card, you won’t be able to apply for Spark until six months later.
• Any cards that are applied for past 1/6 won’t be processed at all and no hard pull is done. It’s an automated system denial.
• You can still have multiples of the same card open at the same time, e.g. two Ventures or two Sparks, so long as you space out the applications. (1)
• You’ll get the bonus on a new card, even if you have the exact same card already, so long as you are approved.

 

As a side note, remember to freeze your Experian credit report before applying for a Capital One card. Capital One will process your application with just Equifax and Transunion pulls when Experian is frozen.

Related:

• List of Churnable Credit Cards
• 19 Things Everybody Should Know About Capital One Credit Cards