The Credit Card Game a Lot of People Were Playing Just Got Harder
A former coworker used to treat opening new credit cards for the sign-up bonus as something close to a side income, methodically applying for a new card every few months, hitting the minimum spend, collecting the bonus, occasionally closing the card afterward and starting again with a different bank. He mentioned recently that the same routine that used to run smoothly for him has gotten noticeably harder over the past year, not because he changed anything, but because the banks did. What he ran into is a real, well-documented shift in how credit card issuers handle exactly this kind of behavior, and it's worth understanding whether the strategy still makes sense at all in its current form.
What actually changed on the issuer side
Several major banks tightened their rules around exactly this kind of pattern over the past year or so. Chase has enforced what's known as its 5/24 rule more consistently across all of its branded cards, a policy that generally blocks approval for a new Chase card if you've opened five or more cards from any bank in the past twenty four months, closing off a path that used to have more flexibility around it. American Express extended its "once per lifetime" bonus restriction to more of its card lineup, meaning some of its most popular cards will now only pay out that welcome bonus a single time ever, no matter how many years pass or how many times the card gets closed and reopened. Citi rolled out a forty eight month family rule across its ThankYou-branded cards, closing another common workaround where someone would apply again well after their prior bonus, just not quite as often as before.
On top of the formal rules, banks have gotten measurably better at detecting the underlying pattern itself, using more sophisticated tools to flag accounts that show a rapid open-spend-close cycle with no real long-term engagement, and increasingly clawing back bonuses they decide were earned through spending that doesn't look genuine, like manufactured spending techniques that used to be a reliable way to hit a minimum spend requirement without actually buying anything you needed.
Why this is happening now
The economics here are fairly straightforward from the bank's side. A sign-up bonus is a real cost to the issuer, and it's meant to be an investment in acquiring a genuinely long-term, revenue-generating customer, someone who keeps the card, uses it regularly, and either carries a balance or generates enough transaction fees over years to make the bonus worthwhile. Someone who opens a card, hits the bonus in three months, and closes it immediately afterward is, from the bank's perspective, pure cost with none of the return they were counting on. As the practice grew more organized and more visible online, with entire communities built around optimizing exactly this cycle, it stopped being a rounding error the banks could quietly absorb and started being a pattern worth actively defending against.
Is it still worth doing at all
The honest answer, based on where things actually stand now, is that the loosely structured version of this, applying constantly and closing everything shortly after, has gotten meaningfully less viable than it used to be. But it hasn't disappeared, it's shifted shape. Bonuses on premium cards have actually gotten larger in some cases, with some offers now worth more than two thousand dollars in travel or cash value, which is a genuinely large amount of money to leave on the table if you're someone who was going to apply for a good card anyway regardless of the bonus.
What's changed is less about whether it's worth chasing a bonus at all, and more about the pace and pattern. The strategy that still works reasonably well going into this shifted landscape is slower and more deliberate: applying for a card you'd genuinely consider keeping, actually using it as a real part of your spending for a meaningful stretch rather than closing it the moment the bonus posts, and being realistic that you're not going to cycle through five or six cards a year the way some of the more aggressive strategies used to describe.
What I'd actually tell someone starting now
If you're brand new to this and considering it, the version worth pursuing in the current environment is picking one or two cards a year that genuinely fit how you actually spend, applying deliberately rather than constantly, and being honest with yourself about whether you'd keep the card even without the bonus attached. That framing alone filters out most of the behavior banks are now actively trying to shut down, because a bank penalizing "rapid open and close with no real engagement" has very little reason to flag someone who applies occasionally and actually uses what they open.
For someone like my former coworker who built an entire habit around the more aggressive version of this, the adjustment isn't giving up on credit card rewards entirely, it's accepting that the volume game has largely closed, and the version that remains looks a lot more like normal, careful use of a rewards card than a repeatable side hustle. That's a less exciting story than the one that used to circulate, but it's a considerably more honest picture of where things actually stand now, and it's still, done carefully, worth real money over a year.