Big Changes Coming For New U.S. Bank Smartly Credit Card Approvals; No Changes Now For Existing Customers (April 14th Cutoff)

Update 4/14/25: Changes are now live.

Original Post 4/8/25:

Most of the rumors about that U.S. Bank Smartly card changes which we discussed in the prior post turned out to be true. Instead of updating that post, let’s just review everything we know. This is based on internal U.S. Bank communication sent out today. (thanks to reddit user Zanutrees)

• No changes are happening at this time for existing U.S. Bank Smartly cardholders. (There was some mention of additional changes happening on 5/19/25, and it’s possible those will affect the existing cardholders, but we don’t know that and my guess is it won’t. That seems to revolve more around the monthly maintenance fee waive; we’ll see.) It’s likely that at some point down the line there will be changes for everyone, but we can hope it’ll last for a while.
• You can apply for the existing/old/better version of the Smartly card through April 13, 2025 and you’ll be grandfathered with all of the old rules and benefits. I can’t advise whether this makes sense or not as we don’t know how long the old benefits will last. I would say for someone who doesn’t find it too difficult and who values the 4% a good deal, it could make sense to sign up now and hope that it’ll last for a while.
• The first version is called internally by the bank reps as Smartly v1 and the upcoming/worse version is v1.1. They don’t use those words when talking to customers.

Here are the negative changes with the new/worse version of the card:

• Only checking balances count toward the reward tiers. Even savings balances do not count, and brokerage does not count either.
• You need $10k balance in checking to get to tier 1 (2.5% rewards). In the old/better version you only needed $5k. The other tiers are $50k (3% rewards) and $100k (4% rewards) on both versions of the card.
• The new/worse version uses a balance calculation based on a 30-day average balance of all qualifying accounts. The old/better version goes with a 90-day average.
• The new/worse version has $10,000 spend limit per billing cycle on the increased rewards (4% or 3% or 2.5%); afterward it’s just a flat 2%. The old version has no limit to spend which can earn the increased reward tiers.
• The new/worse version excludes tax payments, business-to-business purchases, insurance, education/tuition, third party bill payments and direct selling Gift Card online sites from earning bonus rewards; these purchases will earn the base earn of 2% cash back. The old/better version does not have any of these exclusions.

Our Verdict

The biggest surprise to me in these changes is that they won’t allow savings accounts to count toward the rewards tiers. It basically makes the card tiers not really usable. Why not just get rid of the tiers and make it a flat 2% card?

A reader points out that many people end up averaging $10,000 in their checking account over the course of 30 days. And so the new version of the card might make sense for some people as a flat no-fee 2.5% card.

I personally usually average less than $10k and wouldn’t find it useful. Also, I hate having to think about each purchase and whether it will count in one category or another. That’s why I love the 2.62% Bank of America card and the Smartly old/better card version. Once I have to think about what they ‘business-to-business’ or whether some charity is coded as ‘education’, etc, it loses appeal to me.

In the prior post, we expressed some concern that there might be some changes coming on May 19, 2025 to existing cardholders as well. However, as we noted there and still seems to be the case, the May 19th changes are just with regards to the monthly fee on the Smartly checking account being increased to $12 per month. This doesn’t affect anyone who has $100k invested with U.S. Bank since anyone with Gold tier status and higher has the monthly fee waived, see this PDF link.