MasterCard Credit Card Agreement

MasterCard Credit Card Agreement, as filed by Harvard Federal Credit Union, carries a purchase APR of 10.24%–18%, no annual fee and a 1.99% introductory rate. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 34th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

What the agreement puts on the record

What follows is drawn entirely from Harvard Federal Credit Union's CFPB filing for MasterCard Credit Card Agreement. It is issued on the Mastercard network and the filing runs four pages.

Terms captured from the document include a purchase rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a grace period. It is silent on a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate and a penalty rate.

This document discloses several products inside a single rate table. That means the numbers below are the ones the table contains, not necessarily the ones attached to this particular card — the filing itself is the only way to tell them apart.

What the promotional rate is worth

The introductory rate is 1.99%, held for 12 months. It is a discount rather than a holiday — interest still accrues, just more slowly than the go-to rate.

Among the 763 filings here that disclose an introductory rate, 1.99% sits at about the 66th percentile.

Behind the promotion sits a 18% purchase rate. On $5,000 that is in the region of $986 a year once the window closes.

The purchase APR against the corpus

The purchase APR is quoted as a range of 10.24% to 18%. That 7.76-point spread is the whole of what the filing commits to; the method for assigning a rate inside it is not in the document.

Those two numbers occupy very different places in the corpus: roughly the 12th percentile at the bottom and the 34th at the top.

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.

To be precise about which number this is: the filing identifies it as the rate that takes over after the introductory period, not the introductory rate.

What the rate means in dollars

The purchase rate turns a $1,000 revolving balance into roughly $197 of annual interest.

Priced at the median of 21.99%, that balance would generate about $246 in a year — so this agreement comes in around $49 cheaper for the same debt.

That maths assumes a static balance and nothing else — no payments, no additional purchases, no fees folded in.

Charges beyond interest

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.

The downside terms

$10 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 6th percentile of the set.

Paying in full

Anyone clearing the statement balance inside 25 days pays no purchase interest at all under this filing. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

What is outside the disclosure

This page cannot tell you anything about cash advances, balance transfer terms, 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.

Inside Harvard Federal Credit Union's filed lineup

This is one of 3 Harvard Federal Credit Union agreements collected here.

Go to the source

The filed PDF is linked from this page and runs four pages. It is the authority for every figure summarised above; where this page and the document disagree, the document is right.

In short

18% is an unexceptional purchase rate in this collection, and the rest of the terms follow the same pattern. Because there is no annual fee, everything depends on the revolving behaviour: used as a payment instrument and cleared monthly, this agreement costs nothing. And because the filing covers several products in one table, even the figures that are right may belong to a different card.