Bilt Mastercard® Review: Earn Points By Paying Your Rent

As an avid traveler, I’m always looking for new ways to earn more points and miles through my everyday spending. As a result, I earn over one million points every year, allowing me to enjoy all kinds of free flights and hotel stays, upgrades, lounge access, elite status, and more.

Collecting points and miles has saved me thousands and thousands of dollars over the years, and I wouldn’t be able to travel as much without it.

However, there’s traditionally been one huge expense that has always been hard to earn points for: housing expenses like rent and mortgage payments.

However, there is a card that lets you get points on your rent and mortgage!

It’s called Bilt and I’ve been a fan of it since it came out a few years ago. Recently, they relaunched the card to include new features, a welcome bonus, and different card tiers (from a no-fee card to a premium card). Since the card’s new features are a bit complex (overly so in my opinion), I wanted to go over them and talk about whether or not the card is still one you should get.

 

What is Bilt?

Bilt is a credit card that allows you to earn points when you pay your rent and mortgage in addition to your everyday purchases. You then use those points like you would any other rewards program: you can use them to book travel directly, you can transfer them to travel partners, or you can use some of the other redemption options.

While they were originally with Wells Fargo bank, they just relaunched their card with a company called Cardless to have three tiers:

Bilt Blue Card

• Welcome bonus: $100 in Bilt Cash
• Earn up to 1× Bilt Points on rent and mortgage payments
• Earn 1× Bilt Points + 4% back in Bilt Cash on everyday purchases
• $0 annual fee

Bilt Obsidian Card

• Welcome bonus: $200 in Bilt Cash
• Earn up to 1× Bilt Points on rent & mortgage
• 3× points on your choice of grocery or dining each calendar year (capped at $25,000 per year)
• 2× points on travel
• Plus 1× points + 4% Bilt Cash on everyday purchases
• $100 in annual travel/hotel credits (split semi-annually)
• $95 annual fee

Bilt Palladium Card

• Welcome bonus: 50,000 Bilt Points + Gold Status after a minimum spend ($4,000 in 3 months) and $300 in Bilt Cash
• 2× Bilt Points + 4% back in Bilt Cash on everyday spend (excluding rent/mortgage)
• Up to 1× points on rent & mortgage payments
• $400 in annual hotel credits (split semi-annually) + $200 Bilt Cash
• Priority Pass lounge access
• $495 annual fee

Making Sense of Earning Bilt Points

Some of the new program is pretty straightforward. You spend money and you get points that can be transferred to be redeemed for a host of awards, travel, or transferred to their partners. That is just like every other credit card.

But where it gets complicated is how you earn points on your rent and mortgage. Bilt has two options for this:

Option 1: The More You Spend, The More You Earn
If you choose this system, it works the following way:

• Spend at least 25% of your monthly housing payment(s) on everyday purchases, earn 0.5 points per dollar on your rent or mortgage payment that month.
• Spend at least 50% of your monthly housing payment(s) on everyday purchases, earn 0.75 points per dollar on your rent or mortgage payment that month.
• Spend at least 75% of your monthly housing payment(s) on everyday purchases, earn 1 point per dollar on your rent or mortgage payment that month.
• Spend the amount of your monthly housing payment(s) or more on everyday purchases, earn 1.25 points per dollar on your rent or mortgage payment that month.

So, basically, you have to spend 75% or more of the amount of rent/mortgage on day to day life to earn as much as you did under the old system. They are basically forcing you to use the card more.

Option 2: The Bilt Cash Path
All three new Bilt cards have the option to award 4% Bilt Cash on non-housing spend (i.e. everyday purchases). For example, if you spend $1,000 on your Bilt card per month, you’d earn $40 in Bilt Cash, which can be used for a variety of credits (see the next section).

But you can also use Bilt Cash to earn points on rent and mortgage payments. For every $30 in Bilt Cash, you earn 1 point per dollar on $1,000 in rent or mortgage payments, which works out to a 3% return, which is basically you covering the cost of the transaction fee. If you use Bilt Cash, the math looks like this (via One Mile at a Time because I didn’t want to do the math):

Spend $15,000 on a Bilt card, get $600 in Bilt Cash (4% back). Use $600 in Bilt Cash to earn $20,000 in fee free rent or mortgage payments, while earning 1x points.

So, it requires you to figure out how much spending covers the fee for your rent if you use option 2. Lucky from One Mile at a Time said the ratio is 3:4 and I trust him on that because he’s a better numbers guy than I am but how complex right?

Ok, now let’s talk more about Bilt Cash.
 

What is Bilt Cash?

Unlike Bilt Points, which are primarily designed for travel and can be transferred to airline and hotel partners, Bilt Cash acts more like actual money within the Bilt ecosystem. It can be redeemed directly toward rent or mortgage payments, used to book hotels through the Bilt app, or applied as a statement credit on your Bilt card, giving cardholders tangible, immediate value from their rewards. You earn Bilt Cash in addition to Bilt Points. There are two options for earning Bilt Cash:

Option 1: You earn $50 of Bilt Cash for every 25,000 Bilt Points you earn.

Option 2: You earn 4% back in the form of Bilt Cash on your every day spending as well as earn $50 of Bilt Cash for every 25,000 Bilt Points.

You pick which option you want when you enroll (it’s tied the the option you pick on how you earn points on rent).

Bilt Cash can be redeemed for rent, mortgage, hotel stays, or as a statement credit. Here’s a list of credits that can be used:

• GrubHub: $10 per month for grocery or restaurant delivery.
• Gopuff: $5 per month for delivery orders, plus $100 per year toward a Gopuff Fam membership.
• Bilt Dining: $25 per month toward one monthly visit to a Bilt Dining partner, and $50 per month to book Bilt dining experiences.
• Hotel stays: $50 per month for Blue and Silver members, and $100 per month for Gold and Platinum members, toward hotel stays booked through the Bilt travel portal. There is a two-night-stay minimum.
• Lyft: $10 per month for rides.
• Blacklane: Annual ride credit of $50 for Blue and Silver, $100 for Gold and $150 for Platinum.
• BLADE: Up to $350 per seat on up to two seats per year for helicopter flights to the airport.
• Hotel benefits: It’ll cost $95 in Bilt Cash for Blue and Silver members to unlock benefits available to Gold and
• Platinum members. These include room upgrades, $100 hotel credits, late checkout and more.
• Priority Pass lounges: Holders of the Bilt Palladium Card can bring up to two additional guests into Priority
• Pass airport lounges per month for $32 per guest.
• Bilt Neighborhood Parking: $5 per month at participating locations.
• Fitness classes: $40 per month toward classes at participating fitness studios.
• Walgreens: $10 per month.
• Comedy shows: $50 per month toward Bilt comedy experiences.
• Bilt Design Collection: $10 per month.

Note that Bilt Cash expires at the end of the year but up to $100 of unused Bilt Cash automatically rolls over to the following year.
 

Using Bilt Points

Bilt points are transferable points, meaning that you can transfer them to any of their partners to book flights and hotels. These points are valuable because you can transfer them to whatever airline or hotel brand offers the best deal for your desired trip. Here’s Bilt’s list of current travel partners:

• Alaska Airlines
• AerClub (Aer Lingus)
• Aeroplan (Air Canada)
• Accor ALL
• Avianca Lifemiles
• British Airways
• Cathay Pacific
• Emirates
• Flying Blue (Air France/KLM)
• Hilton Honors
• Iberia
• IHG® One Rewards
• JAL Mileage Club
• Marriott Bonvoy™
• Qatar Airways
• TAP Air Portugal Miles&Go
• Turkish Airlines
• United
• Virgin Atlantic
• World of Hyatt®

The fact that you can transfer Bilt points to Alaska Airlines and Hyatt really sets this card apart. No one transfers to Alaska, so this is a huge selling point for this card. It’s the only way to get these points without having an Alaska Airlines card. And earning Hyatt points allows you to have a way out of the Chase system.

It’s easy to find the best use of your Bilt points when booking flights and hotels, as Bilt integrates with both Point.me, the search engine for finding award flights (learn more about Point.me in my review), and Awayz, which helps you find award hotel stays (more in my Awayz review here).
 

Should you get this card? If so, which one?

Bilt has a few other features that I don’t think are as important and don’t factor into the calculus of whether or not this card is good or not. I think they have made this card overly complicated. It has too many options, too many caveats, and too many restrictions on Bilt Cash usage. Plus, with Bilt Cash expiring at the end of the year, it doesn’t make sense to earn a lot of it only to see a lot go wasted. And do you really need ONE more coupon book style card where you have to have a spreadsheet to make sure you’re using all your Bilt Cash?

I believe you should have simplicity in your spending and in your rewards. And this is not that.

There is only one use case in which I think the card can be worth it.

First, I have always said never get only 1 point per dollar spent, which means the only card that really is worth getting is the Bilt Palladium card.

Second, if I were thinking of getting this card, I would choose the straight forward earnings option and put 75% of my monthly spending on this card and then nothing more. So, if you can spend 75% of your rent on daily expenses per month, get this card.

So, to make this card worth it, you have to be a big spender on this card because you don’t want to give up any spending on cards where you get more than 2x points per dollar spent. The 50,000 point welcome bonus is great and you can recoup the cost of the card through your welcome bonus cash and hotel credit but, on a daily basis, unless you already have a lot of 2x or less spend, there’s not Bilt card not worth getting.

In sum, if you are a big spender with a lot of unbonus spend, get the Palladium and use it.

Otherwise, skip Bilt.