Chase Sapphire Preferred Is it the best mid-tier credit card?

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Being the largest bank in USA, Chase bank has marked its presence pretty well in the banking world. Now although their banking products are often buzzing around news articles for one thing or the other , they do offer a bunch of credit cards that have stood the test of time. The well known Chase trifecta includes Chase Sapphire Preferred which is also considered one of the best mid-tier credit cards out there. With a 95$ annual fee, it is considered a great value and is recommended to an average Joe (assuming Joe is interested in optimizing the credit game).

Overview of features and Perks

The Sapphire Preferred is on of the premium travel cards offered by Chase and is on the Visa Signature payment network. If you want to know more about what’s the difference between an issuing bank and the payment network, feel free to read this article.

Here’s a brief overview of the card specs:

Annual Fees

95$ per annum
Rewards

• 5x points on travel booked through Chase's portal • 3x points on dining, takeout, online grocery • 2x points on travel • 1x points everywhere else
Signup Bonus

60,000 UR points after spending $4000 in 3 months

Credit Requirement (720-850)

Our Rating

 3.7/5

Application

Fees and Rewards

At an annual fee of 95$/annum, it is a beginner travel credit card that can easily fit into any person’s spending habits. The reason why Chase Sapphire Preferred is so well known is the sign up bonus that Chase offers for new cardholders which has historically gone up to 100,000 UR points.

The point structure for CSP includes 5x points on travel booked through Chase portal (except hotel bookings through the portal). It also offers 2x points on other travel purchases, 3x on dining, delivery and takeout, 3x on online groceries purchases (except Target, Walmart and wholesale clubs like Costco, Sam’s club etc.), 3x on streaming services, and, 1x on every other purchase. The card also offers a 50$ statement credit for each hotel stay booked through the Chase Ultimate Rewards at the end of your anniversary year. Moreover, you also receive an anniversary bonus in Ultimate Rewards each year equivalent to 10% of your purchases which basically brings out your effective multipliers to 5.1x, 3.1x, 2.1x and 1.1x for all the categories mentioned above.

For specific redemption categories, the points are also valued at 1.25 cent per point (cpp) bringing your effective multipliers to 6.25x on travel portal, 3.75x on dining/online groceries/2.5x on travel and 1.25x on all other purchases. If you apply the annual 10% bonus, that’s even more. This is the reason why the CSP is considered one of the most powerful cards in combination with the Freedom cards offered by Chase to form a powerful Trifecta that offers one of the best credit card redemption values.

For a limited time, Chase also provides all its Sapphire customers a free Doordash Pass and 5x points on cab rides with Lyft.

Did we mention yet that all of this is offered with no foreign transaction fee? This actually makes this card great for traveling internationally since you will mostly be eating out and you can still earn some points. Since the card is on a Visa Signature platform, it will benefit from Visa’s highest global acceptance rate (at least more widely accepted than the shiny Amex). Talking about Amex, this card is also metallic and weighs about 13g.

5x (travel through Chase portal)

In our honest opinion, this is more of a marketing gimmick. Even though you might earn 5x points on travel booked through the portal, you might end up paying already inflated prices. Chase does not have a purchase price protection in place like Capital One so you are stuck with that price even after you find something cheaper elsewhere. Moreover, there have been multiple horror stories of people having trouble with bookings done directly via portal.

In short, avoid the travel portal as much as possible for airfare and hence, you are never really earning 5x points on anything except Lyft rides and hotel bookings.

3x points (dining, online groceries, streaming services)

You earn 3x points on all dining purchases including, restaurants, food delivery services and food pickup purchases.

If you order your groceries online (except Walmart, Target, wholesale clubs), then you will also earn 3x points. Keep in mind that even though wholesale clubs are not included in groceries, you can still use meal plans like HomeChef, Hello Fresh etc. to earn 3x points. Recently, Chase also provides a 6 month Instacart subscription to use for grocery deliveries.

Lastly, you also earn 3x points on all famous streaming services including, netflix, Disney, hulu, Spotify, Apple Music..

2x points (travel)

You earn 2x points on Travel purchases which comprise of any flights, hotels, rental cars, and cruises when booked directly with airlines, hotels, and car rental agencies. Plus, it also includes any public transportation, ferries, cruises etc.

1x points (other charges)

Everywhere else.

If you are already getting excited about earning a whole lot of points, you would be ecstatic to know that the list of offerings does not end here. This card also comes with the following perks:

Purchase Protection: Purchases are covered for 120 days against damage or theft with a cap of 500$ per claim and $50000 per account per year.
Extended Warranty: This feature extends the time period of US manufacturer’s warranty by an additional year on all warranties of 3 years or less.
Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver: Yes you read it right. This is one of the few cards that live up to the premium name and offer primary car rental coverage (unlike some metallic gold cards that have annual fee more than 200$). “Primary” and “Secondary” differ in the fact that “primary” will act as a sole solution for insurance and you can easily deny the coverage offered by the rental company. “Secondary” on the other hand, will only kick in if the amount is not covered by primary insurance offered by the rental company or services like AAA.
Trip cancellation/interruption reimbursement: If your trip is canceled or cut short due to sickness/severe weather/”other” covered reasons, you can be reimbursed upto 10000$ per person for upto 2 people booked on a pre-paid, non-refundable travel fare/hotel charge.
Trip delay insurance: . If your trip is delayed more than 12 hours, you and your family are covered for lodging and meal expenses.
Baggage Delay Insurance: Reimburses essential purchases like clothing and toiletries if your baggage is delayed more than 6 hours upto 500$ per day for 5 days.
Lyft Credits: Earn 5x points till March 31, 2025.
Doordash Pass: You get complimentary DashPass subscription till December 31, 2024.
GoPuff: Receive a monthly 10$ credit from GopPuff till December 31, 2023.

Redeeming Points

All the points are valued at 1 cpp by Chase if you redeem them for statement credit or as cash into your Chase Checking account. Your points never expire so you don’t have any pressure to redeem them early ad there are no minimums for redemption which is a huge advantage. You can also redeem the points for gift cards or on stores like Amazon.

Being a premium offering from Chase i.e. a Sapphire card, the points can also be redeemed at 1.25 cpp. This higher value can be redeemed if you purchase travel through the Chase portal or by taking advantage of occasional promotions in Chase’s “Pay Yourself Back (PYB)” program. The PYB program has offered promotions for all dining purchases, AirBnb purchases and hotel reservations in the past.

Another advantage is the freedom to transfer your points 1:1 to various partners. Click on the carousel below to know more about these redemption options.

Py Yourself Back

Transfer Partners

Gift Cards

Statement Credit/Cash

Py Yourself Back

Transfer Partners

Gift Cards

Statement Credit/Cash

User Experience

Chase, being the most valuable bank in the United States of America, can definitely afford the resources to develop a very intuitive mobile app and security systems. We can gladly say that it shows that the app has been developed by someone who isn’t a website designer from 2001 (staring blankly at Bank of America -_-). If you have other Chase banking products apart from the credit cards, it is also easy to link it directly for making payments/setting up autopay etc. Most importantly, you can clearly see your accumulated UR points and redeem them for cashback directly into your bank account at 1cpp. This makes the Chase trifecta great for cashback lovers as you are not forced to use your accumulated points for travel (yes we took a jab at American Express). Another advantage of Chase’s mobile app is that you can also link all your non-chase accounts to have a single dashboard for all your finances.

The Physical Card

You can take a look at the unboxing experience of this card on our channel. We must say that this was not the most pleasurable unboxing experience. It was a plain envelope, lots of paperwork and nothing special to make you feel that you are paying 95$/annum for a credit card. It has a sandwich structure for the card with a metal core wrapped between two plastic pieces and embedding the chips/NFC. Weighing in at 13g, it is neither the best looking card nor the the one with a heavy vling. You won’t be turning heads in the restaurant on your first date but atleast you’ll be earning great value from the card.

Credit Worthiness

Chase/JP Morgan usually pulls Experian however the credit bureaus can vary based on your state. Here are two websites that keep tracks of the credit bureaus even for different states – doctorofcredit and helpmebuildcredit.

Chase is known to be a very strict bank with respect to it’s underwriting for approvals. If you don’t have a banking history with them and don’t have a credit history >1 year, you will definitely be rejected. Moreover, there is also the Chase 5/24 rule that implies that if you have opened any 5 credit card accounts in the past 24 months, the system will automatically reject you. The only possible scenarios where 5/24 can be avoided is co-branded cards like Starbucks/Amazon/Disney or if you receive a pre-approval offer in mail/on your app. It is also worth noting that if you have had this card in the past 28 months, you are not eligible to receive a Sign-up bonus. Moreover, you can only hold one Sapphire card so you have to choose between this and the Sapphire Reserve.

In our honest recommendation, you should have <4 new accounts in the past 24 months, have atleast >1 year of credit history and a minimum credit score of 720.

Pros And Cons

No foreign transaction fees

The lack of foreign transaction fees and Visa payment network make this card a great option to carry while traveling abroad.

Great rewards structure

Spanning most generic spend categories, the multipliers are high enough to justify the annual fees and still come out ahead of the game.

Ability to pool points with other cards

The Freedom card with no annual fee also earns UR points. You can basically combine the Freedom and Sapphire cards to form your own setup and pool your UR points for better redemption.

Easily downgradable path

As mentioned earlier, you can keep all your points and easily change the Sapphire Preferred into a Freedom series card.

Primary car CDW

Primary coverage on a card that offers 2x points on travel… what else do you need?

Metal Card

If you know you know ;P

Strict underwriting

With all the 5/24 rules and whatnots, it is one of the harder cards to get.

5x only on Chase travel portal

AS mentioned earlier, the horror stories of people trying to use Chase’s travel portal limit the card’s potential for earing 5x points

3x only on online grocery

Not a lot of small grocery stores offer online delivery services and the big wholesale clubs that do, are not covered by Chase,.

Final Verdict

Who should get it?
Who should NOT get it?

Although there are multiple different cards that could provide better value than the Chase Sapphire Preferred if used individually, the CSP does provide a complete package. For example the US Bank Altitude Go offers 4x on dining but falls short in the travel category and cent per point value. Therefore, even with the annual fees, there are multiple ways to still come out ahead of the game using the Chase Sapphire Preferred. The best part is that if you utilize the freedom cards in conjugation with this, you have a great system of cards. You will earn the best multipliers while still having the "freedom" (pun intended) to utilize those points as cashback or for travel.

We would definitely recommend this card to anyone who is just entering the world of traveling with points or anyone who needs a simple set-it-and-forget-it system if used in conjugation with the Freedom cards. As a standalone card however, we can't really justify the annual fees and credits.

This is definitely a beginner card so eventually, you might want to shift to higher annual fee cards with more credits and perks. Basically, everyone should try it since 95$ is not a very high annual fee and the Chase Sapphire Preferred with its very high sign-up bonus is a great stepping stone in the world of points and miles. But, whether you should keep it in the long run or not is something that's debatable.

If you have a credit history less than a year, or have more than 5 new accounts in the past 24 months, there's absolutely no point in wasting a hard pull. You will most likely be denied so look elsewhere. Moreover, if you don't plan to transfer UR points to their transfer partners, there are better cashback systems out there. Wells Fargo, for example, has a great set of cards that cover almost every category of spend and provide cashback. Lastly, if you are someone who likes optimizing cashback or points, you definitely have more options in this competitive landscape.