Blue Cash Preferred Card Cardmember Agreement

The Blue Cash Preferred Card Cardmember Agreement filing quotes margins over Prime instead of finished rates. What that leaves knowable — and what it does not — is the subject of this analysis.

On the face of the filing

What follows is drawn entirely from American Express National Bank's CFPB filing for Blue Cash Preferred Card Cardmember Agreement. It is issued on the Amex network and the filing runs 12 pages.

The disclosure covers a penalty rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum, a foreign transaction fee and a grace period. A purchase rate, a cash advance rate and a balance transfer rate are not stated.

Confidence in the parse of this filing is moderate rather than high, so the figures below are best checked against the original.

Margins, not APRs

The rate figures in this agreement are expressed as margins over the Prime Rate rather than as absolute APRs. A margin is not a rate: the rate is the margin plus whatever Prime happens to be.

The margins captured from the filing are 26.74 points for penalty pricing.

This structure makes the card impossible to price from the filing in isolation — and deliberately so. The rate is whatever Prime is when the statement closes, plus the margin above.

These figures carry medium extraction confidence — they are reproduced as read from the filing, which remains the authority.

Where the fees are

$95 a year is the disclosed annual fee, which ranks near the 92nd percentile of the fees filed across this corpus.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater.

A balance transfer costs $5 or 3% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater up front. The filing does not separately state the rate applied to transferred balances. Shifting $1,000 across attracts something like $30 in fees on day one.

Spending abroad costs an extra 2.7% — about $81 on $3,000 of purchases, independent of interest.

That is at the high end of this corpus — around the 83rd percentile of disclosed foreign transaction fees.

Penalty pricing and late fees

The maximum late fee is $40 — roughly the 72nd percentile of the late fee ceilings disclosed across this index.

Paying in full

The filing gives 25 days' grace on purchases, meaning a statement balance paid in full within that window attracts no interest. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

Inside American Express National Bank's filed lineup

American Express National Bank has 25 agreements indexed on this site.

Its $95 annual fee is higher than 7 of the 24 sibling filings that state one.

The limits of this document

Absent from the captured terms: a purchase rate. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

An agreement filing is not a marketing document. Rewards, perks, welcome offers and eligibility rules are not in it, are not in this dataset, and are therefore not discussed anywhere on this page.

Go to the source

Everything here is a reading of the filed agreement, 12 pages of it, which is linked above and which governs. Terms also change between filings, so the date on the document matters.

In short

Margins over Prime make this agreement legible but not priceable from the document alone. Treat the figures above as structure, and look up the current Prime Rate before drawing conclusions.