Cardmember Agreement

Cardmember Agreement, as filed by Barclays Bank Delaware, carries a purchase APR of 17.49%–34.99% and no annual fee. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 84th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

On the face of the filing

Barclays Bank Delaware submitted the terms for Cardmember Agreement to the CFPB's agreement database; this is what they contain. The filing runs two pages.

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

The row carrying the purchase rate is unlabelled in the original document; it is reported here as the most likely purchase figure rather than a certain one.

Pricing the purchase rate

This is a tiered agreement: the filing discloses a purchase APR anywhere from 17.49% to 34.99%, a spread of 17.5 percentage points. Which end of that band applies is set by the issuer at account opening and the filing does not say how.

Read against the index, the low end ranks around the 47th percentile and the high end around the 84th — the band straddles a wide stretch of the market this corpus describes.

The agreement labels the purchase rate variable, so the quoted figure reflects the index at the time of filing rather than a locked-in price.

What a balance actually costs

A $3,000 balance left untouched for twelve months accrues about $1,256 in interest at this purchase rate.

Against the corpus median of 21.99%, that is approximately $518 a year of extra interest on the same $3,000.

Note the $0.50 minimum interest charge, which overrides the arithmetic above whenever the calculated interest falls below it.

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.

Charges beyond interest

The annual fee is $0. Roughly 75% of filings here that state a fee state zero, so the absence of one is unremarkable in this market.

Cash advances carry a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 29.74%. Advances under roughly $200 are charged the flat $10; larger ones are charged 5%.

The transfer fee is $5 or 3% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater; transferred balances then run at 17.49%. On $3,000 that fee is about $90 before any interest is charged.

Spending abroad costs an extra 3% — about $30 on $1,000 of purchases, independent of interest.

That is at the high end of this corpus — around the 91st percentile of disclosed foreign transaction fees.

The grace period

23 days is the disclosed grace period for purchases — the interval in which paying in full costs nothing. With a corpus median of 25 days, this window is narrower than the norm.

A minimum interest charge of $0.50 applies in any cycle where interest is due, which makes very small revolving balances disproportionately expensive.

The issuer's other agreements

There are 9 filings from Barclays Bank Delaware in this index. The others all file the same 33.24% purchase rate. Whatever separates these products, it is not the cost of borrowing.

What you cannot learn from the filing

The disclosure parsed here does not state penalty pricing. Those gaps are gaps in what could be read from the filing, and the PDF may well address them in prose the rate table does not capture.

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

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

In short

This is an expensive agreement by the standards of the corpus, driven by a 34.99% purchase rate that is inert for a transactor and punishing for a revolver. Because there is no annual fee, everything depends on the revolving behaviour: used as a payment instrument and cleared monthly, this agreement costs nothing.