How Does Downgrading/Product Changing A Citi Card Affect Your 24 Month Eligibility? (Hint: We Have No Idea)

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In every recent post about Citi cards we have mentioned that you’re not eligible for the sign up bonus if you’ve opened or closed a credit card within the same family in the last 24 months. We also link to our detailed post on that rule. Inevitably somebody asks what happens if you product change/downgrade your card. Does this reset your clock or not? Despite having a section on that linked post regarding downgrades people continue to ask. To answer the question, we don’t have any hard data points and don’t currently know how these product changes affect your eligibility.

Frequent Miler has an interesting theory that product changes within the same brand (e.g one American Airlines card to another or one Citi ThankYou card to another) do not reset the clock and that changes between two different brands (e.g American Airlines card to Citi ThankYou points card) do. I know that this post has no real point, but I wanted to post for two reasons:

To try and get some hard data points from readers. I think surely somebody has tried this and knows the answer, if that’s you then please share your datapoints!
To remind readers to read the articles we write properly. A huge number of the questions on this blog are answered in other articles that we have linked to in the article readers are commenting on. If you have a question it’s always a good idea to read the article and any relevant linked articles before asking. I love helping readers but I have a finite amount of time and every question I answer that has already been answered is just less time for me to answer a question that hasn’t been answered.