Bank of America Cash Rewards card now offers 2% cash back grocery store purchases up to a quarterly $2,500, up from the previous limit of $1,500. They also added Wholesale Clubs to the grocery category, an important addition.
You can see the changes here and here on the BofA website, and see the official Terms & Conditions here.
2% Bonus Category: Earn a total of 2% cash back (equal to $0.02, consisting of 1% bonus cash rewards and 1% base cash rewards) for every $1 of Purchases made at eligible grocery store merchants and wholesale clubs, which include supermarkets, freezer/meat lockers, candy, nut or confection stores, dairy product stores, and bakeries. Excluded from this Bonus Category are superstores and smaller stores (like drugstores and convenience stores) that sell groceries and other products.
Bonus Category Cap: Grocery store, Wholesale club and Gas Purchases earn bonus cash rewards on the first $2,500 of combined Purchases made each calendar quarter. Once the $2,500 quarterly limit is reached, you will earn base cash rewards of 1% for those purchases.
Bonus Category Processing: Merchants are assigned a merchant category code (MCC) based on the merchant’s primary line of business. We do not determine which MCC a merchant chooses to classify itself.
‘Wholesale Clubs’ includes places like Costco (who starts accepting Visa soon), BJ’s, and Sam’s Club.
The fine print excluded ‘suprestores’ which sounds to me like it means to exclude Walmart and Target. Note, however, that many Target stores and some Walmart stores come through as grocery stores and have been getting the 2% rate all along as grocery.
Relationship Bonus
The Cash Rewards card gets a relationship bonus ranging from 10% if you have a simple checking account with BofA, to 75% if you have $100k in assets with them.
For those with a banking relationship with BofA, the Cash Rewards card is now the best cash back credit card for Wholesale Clubs purchases since you’ll get at least 2.2% cash back on purchases up to $2,500 quarterly, or even 3.5% cash back for those with a $100k relationship. Quite good. (Remember that the $2,500 limit is shared with the 3% gas category.)
Read more about Bank of America’s 10% – 75% relationship bonus in the post Bank of America Preferred Rewards Program: 5.25% Cash Back On Gas, 3.75% Travel, 2.625% All Purchases.
Final Thoughts
Really a nice addition here and it’s good to see BofA changing their fixtures to keep themselves relavent.
There’s also a $200 signup bonus on the Cash Rewards card so it’s a good time to get the card now if it interests you for use at Wholesale Clubs or for any other reason. And the relationship bonus works on the signup bonus as well, meaning the bonus can be $220 – $350 for relationship customers.
Hat tip to bonersaurus-rex on Reddit
