The Credit Deadline Report 2026
What US cardholders are actually tracking: how many recurring credits a wallet carries, how often they expire, and which ones people give up on.
Quick answer: US premium cardholders are no longer managing a handful of perks; they are managing a calendar. The US cardholders tracking in MaxWorth hold 4.5 cards each, pay a median $740 a year in annual fees, and track 13.7 recurring credits worth $2,958 at face value, which produce 59 separate deadlines a year. Nearly half face at least one credit deadline every week. The credits people explicitly give up on fall into three groups: spend-gated, niche-merchant, and duplicated across cards; half of everyone with a Global Entry/TSA PreCheck credit holds it on two or more cards.
1. What the wallet looks like
4.5 cards per cardholder on average (median 4), with mean annual fees of $856 and a median of $740. 57.8% hold at least one card with a $395+ fee; 22% hold two or more, and that group pays $1,819 a year on average. 4.5% hold both the Amex Platinum and the Chase Sapphire Reserve, $1,690 in fees between the two cards.
| Annual fees per cardholder | Share of cardholders | Avg credit face value | Face value ÷ fees |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0 | 12.8% | $137 | — |
| $1 to $249 | 18.1% | $590 | 4.6× |
| $250 to $499 | 12.1% | $989 | 2.5× |
| $500 to $999 | 25.9% | $2,769 | 3.5× |
| $1,000 to $1,999 | 21.6% | $4,626 | 3.2× |
| $2,000+ | 9.5% | $8,997 | 3.2× |
Face value is the sum of the issuer-stated credit caps, not realised value. The ratio holding near 3× across fee bands means issuers scale credits with the fee rather than diluting them.
| Most-held cards | Share of cardholders | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Chase Sapphire Preferred | 40.1% | $95 |
| Chase Freedom Unlimited | 33.1% | $0 |
| Discover it | 21.7% | $0 |
| BoA Customized Cash Rewards | 20.6% | $0 |
| Chase Freedom Flex | 20.3% | $0 |
| Amex Platinum | 19.8% | $895 |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve | 17.9% | $795 |
| Amex Gold | 17.2% | $325 |
| Capital One Venture X | 12.9% | $395 |
| Amex Hilton Aspire | 12.9% | $550 |
2. The deadline load: 59 a year
Among users tracking at least one recurring credit, the average wallet carries 13.7 of them (median 12; the top 10% carry 27 or more), worth $2,958 at face value on average and $1,700 at the median. Expanding each credit by its cycle (12 for monthly, 4 for quarterly, 2 for semi-annual, 1 for annual) gives 59.2 deadlines per cardholder per year, median 50, and 120 or more for the top 10%. 47.1% face 52 or more a year: at least one every week.
| By cycle | Share of cardholders tracking a credit on this cycle |
|---|---|
| monthly | 85.4% |
| quarterly | 69.7% |
| semi-annual | 58.4% |
| annual | 92.9% |
| The biggest widely tracked credits | Cycle | Share of cardholders | Face value per holder per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amex Business Platinum · $2,400 One AP subscription credit | annual | 7.7% | $2,400 |
| Amex Platinum · $600 hotel credit | semi-annual | 19.8% | $600 |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $500 The Edit hotel credit | annual | 17.9% | $500 |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $500 Southwest credit (after $75k spend) | annual | 17.9% | $500 |
| Amex Platinum · $400 Resy credit | quarterly | 19.8% | $400 |
| Amex Platinum · $300 Lululemon credit | quarterly | 19.8% | $300 |
| Amex Platinum · $300 Equinox credit | annual | 19.8% | $300 |
| Amex Platinum · $25 monthly digital entertainment credit | monthly | 19.8% | $300 |
3. The credits people give up on
Share of tracked rows the holder explicitly marked as skipped (an action, not an omission). Cards with at least 800 holders. The ten most-skipped credits fall into three groups: spend-gated (unlock only after $75,000 of spend), niche-merchant, and duplicated across cards.
| Credit | Marked skipped | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $500 Southwest credit (after $75k spend) | 7.8% | spend-gated |
| Citi AA Platinum Select · American Airlines flight discount | 7.6% | spend-gated |
| Amex Hilton Aspire · TSA PreCheck / Global Entry credit | 7.5% | duplicated across cards |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $10 monthly Peloton credit | 7.3% | niche merchant |
| Amex Delta Gold · $200 Delta flight credit | 7.1% | spend-gated |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $250 The Shops at Chase credit (after $75k spend) | 6.7% | spend-gated |
| Amex Marriott Brilliant · TSA PreCheck / Global Entry credit | 6.5% | duplicated across cards |
| Chase United Explorer · Global Entry / TSA PreCheck credit | 6.1% | duplicated across cards |
| Chase United Explorer · $100 United travel credit | 5.8% | spend-gated |
| Chase Hyatt · Complimentary DashPass | 5.2% | duplicated across cards |
Duplication is the under-appreciated reason: 80.2% of cardholders hold at least one card with a Global Entry / TSA PreCheck credit, and 50.9% of those hold it on two or more cards. One person can only be reimbursed once every four years; the extra copies are unusable from the day the card arrives.
4. Which credits get logged as used
September 2026. Among users active in the app that month who held the card before September 1, the share who logged the credit as used. These are marks in a tracker with no bank connection, so they are lower bounds on real use and are best read against each other, not as absolute usage rates.
| Monthly credit, September 2026 | Logged as used | Index (top = 100) |
|---|---|---|
| Amex Marriott Brilliant · $25 dining credit | 20.1% | 100 |
| Amex Gold · $7 Dunkin credit | 13.8% | 69 |
| Amex Gold · $10 Uber credit | 13.5% | 67 |
| Amex Platinum · $15 Uber credit | 12.4% | 62 |
| Amex Platinum · $25 digital entertainment credit | 12.2% | 61 |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · Apple Music | 11.7% | 58 |
| Amex Gold · $10 dining credit | 11% | 55 |
| Amex Platinum · $12.95 Walmart+ credit | 10.9% | 54 |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · Apple TV | 10.6% | 53 |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · DoorDash credit | 8.5% | 42 |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $10 Lyft credit | 6.6% | 33 |
| Chase Sapphire Preferred · $10 DoorDash credit | 3.5% | 17 |
| Amex Business Platinum · $10 wireless credit | 3.1% | 15 |
| Amex Blue Cash Preferred · $10 Disney Bundle credit | 2.9% | 14 |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $10 Peloton credit | 1.3% | 6 |
| Amex Blue Cash Everyday · $7 Disney Bundle credit | 0.5% | 2 |
| Amex Blue Cash Everyday · $15 Home Chef credit | 0.2% | 1 |
How to read it: within the same group of active Chase Sapphire Reserve users, Apple Music is logged nine times as often as Peloton; within the same Amex Platinum users, the Uber, digital entertainment and Walmart+ credits are logged at nearly the same rate. Small, monthly, single-merchant credits (Peloton, Home Chef, Disney Bundle) sit at the bottom, matching the skip list in section 3.
| Quarterly and semi-annual credits, H1 2026 | Logged as used |
|---|---|
| Amex Platinum · $75 quarterly Lululemon credit | 9.9% |
| Amex Platinum · $100 quarterly Resy credit | 8.6% |
| Amex Platinum · $300 semi-annual hotel credit | 6.9% |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $150 semi-annual Exclusive Tables dining credit | 6.9% |
| Chase Sapphire Reserve · $150 semi-annual StubHub credit | 4.9% |
When in the month
When monthly credits get logged as used, April through September 2026, by day of month. There is no end-of-month rush: the final six days account for one in five uses, about the same as the first five days.
| Day of month | Share of logged uses |
|---|---|
| Days 1 to 5 | 20.7% |
| Days 6 to 10 | 14.1% |
| Days 11 to 20 | 28.9% |
| Days 21 to 25 | 16.3% |
| Days 26 to 31 | 19.8% |
5. A side note on card-linked offers
Users syncing Amex and Chase offers through the MaxWorth browser extension are a much smaller sub-sample, but the numbers are worth recording: the catalogue holds 4,642 offers (Chase 2,993, Amex 1,649), the median active user has 37 live offers at any moment, and those users activated 254 offers each in the last 90 days. Nobody reaches that volume one click at a time.
Method and limits
- Sample: every user who had added at least one US credit card to MaxWorth as of October 3, 2026, a five-figure sample. This report publishes percentages, means and medians only, never absolute headcounts; every row rests on at least 100 users. US cardholders only; Canadian and Australian wallets are excluded from every table below.
- Self-selected: MaxWorth users chose to download a benefits tracker, so they hold more premium cards and care more about credits than the average cardholder. The wallet figures describe this population, not all US cardholders.
- MaxWorth never connects to a bank account and cannot see transactions. The structure figures in sections 1 and 2 (cards, fees, number and cycle of credits) come from the cards users added and the issuers' published terms, independent of any user action, and are robust. The behavior figures in sections 3 and 4 come from manual marks and are lower bounds on real use: not logged does not mean not used. Section 4 therefore publishes a relative index and never a claim that "X% of cardholders did not use" a credit.
- Face value uses issuer-stated caps; status benefits such as Delta Sky Club access are counted at the MaxWorth database valuation; one-time credits such as Global Entry are excluded from the annual deadline count.
- All figures are aggregates and contain nothing that identifies a person. Each number traces back to one read-only SQL query.
- To cite: MaxWorth, "The Credit Deadline Report 2026", https://maxworth.app/data/credit-deadline-report-2026/. Licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse the figures and tables with attribution. Download the CSV.
MaxWorth is a privacy-first credit card benefits tracker: recurring credits, annual-fee ROI, card-linked offers and cashback portal rates — without connecting a bank account. Related: How to track Amex Platinum and Sapphire Reserve credits · The 9 best tracker apps, ranked