Share Data Points On What Earns 4% With The U.S. Bank Smartly Card

Feel free to discuss and share data points in the comments below on what works to earn 4% cashback on the U.S. Bank Smartly Visa card.

For context, some of us are grandfathered into the old U.S. Bank Smartly system whereby holding $100k in their brokerage gets us access to earn 4% cashback on up to $10,000 in purchases each statement cycle.

However, the fine print now excludes a number of categories from earning 4%. These purchases only earn 2% cashback and do not count against the $10k limit:

Education/school
Gift cards
Insurance
Taxes
Business-to-business transactions (i.e., advertising services, construction material suppliers, etc.)
Transactions using third-party bill payment services

Hopefully we’ll get some more clarity on what merchants or types of merchants are excluded in the Education or Gift cards categories, for example. Perhaps we’ll learn of ways to pay Taxes or Insurance and still earn 4% (maybe via Paypal?). And it would be nice to learn more about the Business-to-business exclusion and the third-party-bill-payment exclusion (Paypal?).

You can see whether you earned 2% or 4% within the Rewards tab after the transaction settles, even before the statement closes.

Important note: The terms changed since 9/15/25, and U.S. Bank now initially shows the 2% earn rate on all purchases. Only after statement close the cashback rate gets uplifted to 4%. Thus, no one will know for certain whether a given transaction earned 2% or 4% until after statement close.

Does not work:

MCC’s that did work for 4%:

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