Chase recently began offering some checking bonuses in the form of Ultimate Rewards instead of cash. There’s the current Sapphire Banking 60,000 points bonus for personal accounts, and there was previously – now expired – a 30,000 or 50,000 points bonus for a business checking account earlier this year. We weren’t positive how Chase would value the Ultimate Rewards points or if they’d send a Form 1099 at all.
The verdict is now in: they do send a Form 1099INT for points bank bonuses with a valuation of 1 cent per point. A friend just got a Form 1099INT for the 30,000 points business checking bonus, and presumably the Sapphire Banking bonus is getting a Form 1099INT as well. It’s basically what we’d have expected, at least they aren’t valuing it more than 1 cent per point.
Citi also sends out a Form 1099 for bank bonuses which are in the form of ThankYou points, but they only send out if you earned $600+ since they consider it under the 1099MISC category1099 which is only required to be reported at the $600 threshold. Chase puts account bonuses along with interest earnings on the Form 1099INT which is reportable on earnings as little as $10.
We’ll have a post up tomorrow with a more general roundup of details on 1099 forms being sent out now.
