That $25K’th grocery charge on AMEX Gold

After upgrading a lot of my Plat cards to Golds last year for the upgrade bonus, I’m about to hit that point where I’m going to dowgrade them back to Golds so I can use up the $25K 4X at groceries. With that said, I had posed the question – “Let’s say you’ve charge $24K on the card. What if you charged say $10K on the next charge, does AMEX give you 4X for all $10K or just $1K?” Answers were a bit mixed; some folks said all $10K would work and some said nope, AMEX will split the bonus. I know for sure the OBC (RIP old friend) will split the charge – meaning if you had spent $6.4K wherever and then you charged $1K at grocery, you’d get 1% on $100 and 5% on $900.

I had forgotten my wife had the Gold earlier this year and so I went looking to see what I had done.

Here’s the first screenshot:

I thought wow! It did let me go over. However, when I went to look at my transaction history, I was at $21,250 before I made this $4K charge at groceries:

As you can see, I didn’t get 16K points on that charge. That means AMEX did split that last charge and thus only gave me 100K for the $25K at groceries. My guess is the first graphic is wrong or it totaled something else weird. If you look at your MR transaction history view, that should be more accurate.

When I look at the Blue Business Cash I got this year, which is supposed to give me 2% for the first $50K of spend, I see this:

When I look at the transaction history, I had charged $49,485.07 which earned me $989.70 of cashback thus far. My next charge after that was $1499.51, which should have given me a total cb of $1019.69 if we assume AMEX gave me the full 2%. However, they split that last $1500 charge. They gave me 2% on $515 ($10.30) and 1% on $985 ($9.85). This means $989.70 + $10.30 + $9.85 = $1009.85. Down to the penny!

Whoever is telling you that AMEX will give you the full rewards on that last charge that goes over needs to double check their math. Maybe they got refunds or something to skew the math. Both of my data points are pretty clean. If AMEX did let you have “spillage,” what’s to stop someone from getting the GOLD and running $100K at groc on their first charge to net them 400K total MR – you just know AMEX is smarter than that, especially since they split the OBC so cleanly.