How to Trigger Amex Credit Limit Increase

We’ve written before about Amex’s generous credit lines and how to go about getting a credit limit increase with them.

I never requested a credit limit increase on my Amex cards simply because they were high enough for my purposes and I didn’t particularly need one. (Maybe add a little laziness in there as well.)

Recently, when making a purchase of $2,000 in gift cards at my local supermarket (to accrue extra gas points), I split the charge between two cards; $1400 on Amex Blue Cash which has grocery as a bonus category, and the balance on a Chase card to meet a minimum spend requirement.

Exactly 18 minutes after swiping my card, I received an email from Amex stating that they had raised my credit limit from $6600 to $9200.

Being that it happened eighteen minutes later, it appears to be an automated credit limit increase, triggered by the large purchase.

Any large charge could possibly trigger an automated increase (I’d also charged $500 at the grocery store the day before). But I wonder if the trigger was more based on the fact that the transaction at the grocery had been a split-tender and it wasn’t put entirely on the Amex card. (For some reason, in Amex for Target transaction history it shows up clearly when you do a split-tender transaction. From there I learned that the card issuers can see this.) Amex may have coded to detect such activity so as to keep more spend being put on Amex cards. If only they knew I was using the card just to take advantage of the category bonus…

Ultimately, I imagine that I could have gotten the increase by just requesting it – they wouldn’t have given it otherwise, but it’s interesting to see the thought-process of Amex in what triggered the increase.

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