One of the application rules for American Express has always been that you can not hold more than four of their credit cards at any one time. You can have as many charge cards as you like, but there has been a hard limit of four credit cards. This rule only applied to credit cards that they issue, not cards issued by other banks running on the American Express payment network (see: full list of American Express third party credit cards).
We’ve recently received a bunch of data points that this is no longer the case:
- Five chinese data points
- Other data points: 1Â (approved on 19th), 2Â (approved on 28th), 3, 4Â (has 6 cards, not clear if all are credit)
On the flip side, there are data points that this rule is still being enforced:
- March 23rd, 2016 they did enforce the rule (called in)
- Insta denied on 24th, approved after closing card
- Denied on 24/25th
- Denied for SPG Business
- Denied on March 30th
What Should You Do With This Information?
Nothing, at the moment it looks like they aren’t enforcing the rule for ~50% of people and are enforcing the rule for the other 50%. Not sure why they are allowing it for some people and not others. This should really only be an issue for people if there are 4 American Express credit cards that you actually want to keep, otherwise just cancel some before applying for another.
Hat tip to US Credit Card Guide for making me aware of this and data points from Frequent Miler as well.
