Consumer card agreements

On the record for Consumer card agreements: a purchase APR of 19.74%–27.74%, no annual fee and a 0% opening rate, filed by Bank of the West. Against the 4,587 filings on this site, that rate lands around the 67th percentile.

The disclosed terms

Consumer card agreements is one of the agreements Bank of the West has on file with the CFPB. It is issued on the Mastercard network and the filing runs 35 pages.

The filing is explicit about a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate, an annual fee line and a late payment maximum. No figure appears for a penalty rate and a foreign transaction fee.

The interest-free window

The filing discloses a 0% introductory rate, though it does not state how long the promotional period runs.

Roughly 458 of the 4,587 filings indexed here disclose a zero-percent introductory rate, so this is a real feature of the document but not a rare one.

What matters more than the promotion is the rate waiting behind it: 27.74%. A $1,000 balance that survives the promotional window costs roughly $320 a year from that point on.

Pricing the purchase rate

The purchase APR is quoted as a range of 19.74% to 27.74%. That 8-point spread is the whole of what the filing commits to; the method for assigning a rate inside it is not in the document.

The floor of that band sits at about the 60th percentile of filed purchase rates; the ceiling sits at about the 67th. In corpus terms the same card can be cheap or expensive depending on how it is priced.

Because the rate is variable, the figure quoted is tied to an index and will drift with it. Nothing here is a fixed commitment.

The cost of carrying a balance

Put $4,000 on the card and never reduce it, and twelve months of interest at the disclosed purchase rate comes to approximately $1,278.

A card priced at the corpus median of 21.99% would charge roughly $983 on that balance. This one charges about $295 more per year.

Per statement cycle that is on the order of $92.21 on $4,000, which is the number that actually shows up on a bill.

These figures are arithmetic on the disclosed rate, not a quote: they assume the balance is never reduced, ignore any payments, and take no account of fees charged separately.

Paying in full

Purchases carry a 25-day grace period: pay the statement in full inside it and the purchase rate never applies. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

A minimum interest charge of $1 applies in any cycle where interest is due, which makes very small revolving balances disproportionately expensive.

What a missed payment costs

The maximum late fee is $41 — roughly the 89th percentile of the late fee ceilings disclosed across this index.

Where the fees are

No annual fee appears in the filing, in line with the roughly 75% of disclosing agreements in this index that charge nothing to hold the card.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $10 or 4% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 29.74%. Cash is therefore 2 points dearer than buying something with the card. The two halves of that fee cross at about $250: below it the flat $10 applies, above it the percentage does.

Transferred balances are priced at 19.74%; no separate transfer fee was captured from the filing.

The issuer's other agreements

There are 14 filings from Bank of the West in this index. The issuer's own range is 14.24%–26.74%. At 27.74%, this agreement is dearer than 9 of its siblings.

What you cannot learn from the filing

This page cannot tell you a foreign transaction fee and penalty pricing, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain them.

What this analysis can address is bounded by the filing: rates, fees and the terms around them. Everything a card issuer might advertise — rewards, benefits, bonuses, who qualifies — falls outside the document and outside this review.

Reading the agreement yourself

This summary stands or falls on the linked PDF — 35 pages. Agreements are amended over time, and the filing reflects the terms as submitted rather than as they stand today.

In short

The pricing here is middling by the standards of the index — 27.74% on purchases is near enough to typical. The absence of an annual fee means the rate is the only thing that can make this card expensive.