Travel Rewards American Express Card Terms and Conditions

Travel Rewards American Express Card Terms and Conditions, as filed by Union Bank & Trust, carries a purchase APR of 12.24%–23.24%, a $95 annual fee and a six-month 0% opening period. That purchase rate ranks near the 55th percentile across this corpus of 4,587 filings.

The disclosed terms

What follows is drawn entirely from Union Bank & Trust's CFPB filing for Travel Rewards American Express Card Terms and Conditions. The filing runs three pages, and It is issued on the Amex network.

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. A penalty rate and a grace period are not stated.

What the promotional rate is worth

The filing discloses a 0% introductory rate running six months. For that window, balances covered by the promotion accrue no interest at all.

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.

The go-to rate is 23.24%. Any balance still outstanding when the promotion lapses starts accruing at that figure — about $785 a year on $3,000.

The promotional window is therefore worth something on the order of $392 on $3,000, measured against the same balance priced at the standard rate for the same period.

Pricing the purchase rate

Purchases price between 12.24% and 23.24% under this filing. The 11-point gap between the two is material, and nothing in the agreement indicates where a given account would land.

Those two numbers occupy very different places in the corpus: roughly the 18th percentile at the bottom and the 55th at the top.

The filing marks this rate as variable, which means it moves with the index the agreement names rather than staying where it is quoted today.

This figure is the post-promotional rate. The introductory pricing is handled separately further down.

Translating the rate into money

Put $1,500 on the card and never reduce it, and twelve months of interest at the disclosed purchase rate comes to approximately $392.

On a median-priced agreement from this index (21.99%) the same $1,500 would run about $369 a year, so this card costs in the region of $23 more annually for the identical balance.

There is also a floor: the filing sets a minimum interest charge of $2, so any cycle that accrues less than that is billed at $2 anyway.

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

Charges beyond interest

The annual fee is $95, charged whether or not the card is used. Against the filings here that disclose a fee, that sits at roughly the 92nd percentile.

One way to size that fee: at the card's own purchase rate of 23.24%, $95 is roughly the interest a balance of about $409 would generate in a year. The fee is a fixed cost that behaves like perpetual interest on that much debt.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $5 or 3% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 24.24%. Cash is therefore 1 points dearer than buying something with the card. The two halves of that fee cross at about $167: below it the flat $5 applies, above it the percentage does.

Balance transfers cost $5 or 3% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater up front and then accrue at 12.24%. Shifting $5,000 across attracts something like $150 in fees on day one.

The foreign transaction fee is zero — a minority position in this corpus, where roughly 22% of disclosing filings waive it.

Default pricing

$37 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 59th percentile of the set.

The grace period

Where interest applies at all, the filing bills at least $2. On a tiny balance that floor can dwarf the rate itself.

What the filing does not tell you

The disclosure parsed here does not state a grace period and 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.

The issuer's other agreements

Union Bank & Trust has 7 agreements indexed on this site. The issuer's own range is 21.24%–23.24%. At 23.24%, this agreement is dearer than 2 of its siblings.

Its $95 annual fee is higher than 6 of the 6 sibling filings that state one.

Go to the source

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

In short

The pricing here is middling by the standards of the index — 23.24% on purchases is near enough to typical. The $95 annual fee is charged regardless of use, so it is a cost that applies even to an account that never revolves.