Bilt Palladium Card – A Complicated Way to Simplify Travel Hacking

The Bilt Palladium Card is the premium card that Bilt has created for its program. I think this card will have mass appeal for people who want to earn benefits for their everyday spend, but don’t want to juggle multiple credit cards. It is a great one-card solution for people who wish to do some travel hacking but don’t want to spend all of their time learning about multiple credit cards and programs. That being said, the Bilt program itself is complicated.

The Palladium Card is a Premium Card

For people who are not used to premium travel cards, the $495 annual fee is a lot. However, as with all premium cards, this needs to be weighed against the benefits of the card. Here are some highlights:

• $400 in hotel credits ($200 twice a year for 2-night hotel stays booked through Bilt Travel)
• Priority Pass Membership
• $200 Bilt Cash annually
• Trip Cancellation Insurance
• Trip Delay Insurance
• Cell Phone Protection
• No foreign transaction fees
• Lost or Damaged Luggage Protection

For those of us who carry multiple travel cards, the Priority Pass membership is less important, because chances are we are getting that benefit from another card, but for someone who only wants one credit card and flies a lot, this is a great benefit. The $400 hotel credit probably will just be a discount off a stay, since it’s $200 each time for a minimum 2-night stay. I’m sure there are some $100 per night hotels in the Bilt travel portal, but not a lot.

The travel coverage and cell phone coverage are nice to have and are also pretty standard for premium travel credit cards.

Signup Bonus

The Bilt Palladium Card currently has a signup bonus of 50,000 Bilt points after $4,000 in non-mortgage or rent spending and $300 Bilt Cash. This is a very small signup bonus by premium card standards, but that’s how Bilt operates. They just don’t want to offer huge signup bonuses, and I don’t expect them to offer more later. They are also offering Gold Elite status good through the remainder of 2026 and 2027 as part of the signup bonus.

Earning Rate

One of the things I love about this card is that it earns 2X Bilt points on all purchases (except rent or mortgage). Similar to the Capital One Venture X, they made the earning on the card simple and rewarding. In addition to the 2X Bilt Points you earn on all spend, you also earn 4X Bilt Cash on all purchases.

If you pay your rent or mortgage using Venmo or ACH through the Bilt website, you will earn 1X Bilt Points on that transaction, as long as you unlock those points by spending on the Bilt Palladium Card (this is a little complicated; I’ll explain later). For people who enjoy earning points, being able to accumulate points on a mortgage or rent is amazing. That is a feature of Bilt cards that just isn’t available with Amex, Chase, Capital One, or Citibank.

Bilt Points are Special

The most exciting thing about earning 2X Bilt Points on all purchases is that the points are so incredibly valuable. Bilt has the best collection of transfer partners among the major transferable currencies, and they continue to add partners. Here is the complete list as of January 2026.

• Aer Lingus (1:1)
• Air Canada (1:1)
• Atmos Rewards (Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Airlines) (1:1)
• Avianca Lifemiles (1:1)
• British Airways (1:1)
• Cathay Pacific (1:1)
• Emirates (1:1)
• Etihad Guest (1:1)
• Flying Blue (KLM and Air France) (1:1)
• Iberia (1:1)
• Japan Airlines (1:1)
• Southwest Airlines (1:1)
• Spirit Airlines (1:1)
• Tap Portugal (1:1)
• Turkish Airlines (1:1)
• Qatar Airways (1:1)
• United Airlines (1:1)
• Virgin Red
• All Accor Limitless (3:2)
• Hilton (1:1)
• Hyatt (1:1)
• IHG (1:1)
• Marriott Bonvoy (1:1)

The highlights of this list are the fact that you can transfer to Atmos, United, and Southwest on the domestic side, and that internationally, it has some airlines like Tap Portugal and Japan Airlines that don’t have a lot of other transfer partners. On the hotel side, being able to transfer to Hyatt at a 1-to-1 ratio is fantastic, and the All Accor partnership is also great.

Bilt Cash is the Wild Card

Bilt Cash was created to solve a specific problem that Bilt had. When Bilt was created, they knew they would lose money on points earned through rent payments, but they assumed they would make it up in other charges throughout the month. They required cardholders to make five transactions on the card to unlock the points earned from rent. Often, they would make five small purchases, and it wasn’t enough for Bilt to recover the cost of those points through interchange fees.

For the new cards, they solved this issue by creating a convoluted system to unlock your Bilt points earned from rent or mortgage payments. Every Bilt card earns 4X Bilt Cash on all transactions, except for rent or mortgage payments. You can unlock the points earned from rent or mortgage by paying 3% of the total mortgage in Bilt Cash.

What this means is that, if your rent or mortgage was $1,000 per month, you would need to use $30 in Bilt Cash to unlock the 1,000 Bilt points earned from that transaction. In order to earn the $30 in Bilt Cash, you would need to spend $750 on a Bilt Card to earn the $30 in Bilt Cash.

What this means in practice is that you will need to charge 75% of your total rent or mortgage payment on other transactions, every month to earn enough Bilt Cash to unlock the points earned from your rent or mortgage payment. Charges above that 75% get banked as Bilt Cash and can be used on a variety of things, like Lyft rides, Bilt Dining experiences, hotel credits, fitness classes, and even Blade helicopter airport transfers. For most of these items, it’s more of a coupon or discount rather than a full payment.

The use of Bilt Cash that is the most interesting to me is the point accelerator option, which allows you to use $200 in Bilt Cash to increase your Bilt Points earning by 1X for the next $5,000 in spend. That would turn this 2X card into a 3X anywhere card.

Gold Status and Transfer Bonuses

One of the reasons why Bilt points are so valuable is the massive transfer bonuses that occur on Rent Day. Essentially, Bilt does a promotion on the first of each month, and many of these have been wild transfer bonuses. For instance, in April 2025, Bilt offered a transfer bonus to Avios (British Airways, Aer Lingus, Iberia, etc) of up to 100%, but the bonus was based on status. Members with Blue status were eligible for a 50% bonus, Silver 60%, Gold 75% and Platinum 100%.

What that means is that if the cardholder wanted to transfer their Bilt points to Avios, and they had Gold status, then a 10,000-point transfer becomes 17,500 Avios. A member with Blue status only would have received 15,000 Avios, so having elevated status really matters.

There appears to be an option to use Bilt Cash to move up a status. Currently, I’m listed as a Blue member, and it says that I can upgrade (for Rent Day) to Silver status for $75 in Bilt Cash. If this card is offering Gold Status as a signup bonus and you can upgrade to Platinum status for a day (to increase a transfer bonus percentage), all of a sudden a much larger transfer bonus could be unlocked for a little Bilt Cash. At this point, we have no idea whether that $75 offer will be available every month and with every status, but it is worth keeping an eye on.

Benefits

The benefits of the Bilt Palladium Card aren’t the best in the business, but they are beneficial. The trip cancellation insurance and trip delay coverages could be useful if your travels don’t go the way they should. Priority Pass membership is also nice to have if you would like to enjoy a couple of hours in an airport lounge during a layover.

The hotel credits could be useful, and they are large enough to be a significant discount on a two-night stay, and the $200 annual Bilt Cash could potentially prove extremely useful. There is some speculation that you can pair $100 in Bilt Cash with $200 in hotel credits to get $300 off a two-night hotel stay booked through the Bilt Travel Portal, but we’ll have to wait to see on that.

Comparison to Venture X

Based on what we know, the Palladium Card will be a great way to earn a lot of Bilt points on spend. If you compare it to other credit cards with transferable points, the earning structure is great.

Let’s compare it to the Capital One Venture X Card, which earns two Capital One Venture Miles for every dollar spent on the card. Let’s assume your rent or mortgage is $2,000. If you were going to spend $1,500 on the Venture X, you would earn 3,000 Venture miles. You can’t earn points on the mortgage, so it’s a total of 3,000 miles.

With the Bilt Palladium Card, you would pay the $2,000 rent or mortgage through the Bilt platform using Venmo or ACH. The $1,500 in spend on the card would earn $60 in Bilt Cash, which you could use to unlock the 2,000 Bilt Points from the rent or mortgage. In addition, you would earn 3,000 Bilt Points from the non-mortgage spending on the card. That would be a total of 5,000 Bilt Points, instead of 3,000 Venture Miles on the same spend.

Because you can’t earn points on rent or mortgage with any other card, you almost need to consider it a 3.3X card until you spend more than you need to unlock points from your mortgage. That’s huge! After you’ve unlocked the points from your mortgage its 2X on everything and 4X Bilt Cash.

Bilt Cash really looks like a way to create your own coupon-like benefits, but with any excess Bilt Cash, I’m going to look at the points accelerator. Up to 5 times a year, you can turn $200 in Bilt Cash into an additional 1X on spend made with the Bilt Palladium Card. That means that instead of being a 2X anywhere card, it becomes a 3X anywhere card (for the next $5,000 in spend).

Who is the Bilt Palladium Card For?

I have been known to churn and burn credit cards for signup bonuses. It’s a great way to earn a lot of points in a hurry. Because of these signup bonuses, credit card companies have a tendency to front-load the best features of the cards. For example, my Chase Ink Unlimited card had a 90,000-point bonus on $6,000 in spend and 1.5x on all spend. This means that for the first $6,000 in spending on the card, I earned 16.5X on all spend, then 1.5x forever after that. It’s no wonder that people want to churn and burn those cards.

With the Bilt Palladium Card, yes, there is a 50,000 point bonus, so for the first $4,000, you will earn 14.5x on the first $4,000. After that, however, you earn essentially 3.3X Bilt Points on all spending until you unlock your mortgage points, then 2X Bilt Points and 4X Bilt Cash. If you use the Bilt Cash earned on the points accelerator, the earnings get even better.

In the end, I think this card will be best for someone who travels occasionally and would like to lower the cost of that travel with the most valuable points available. If someone concentrates on this one program, takes advantage of Bilt partners as well as the great earning rates, and finds good use for Bilt cash, this could be a great card.

For example, let’s say you are a homeowner, with a family of 4, and your mortgage is $2,000, and you spend $4,000 per month on other spend on the card. You would earn 10,000 Bilt Points per month as well as $100 in Bilt Cash each month (above what is necessary to unlock the points from the mortgage). If you also figure in the 50,000 Bilt Point bonus and the $300 Bilt Cash signup bonus, that would equal 170,000 Bilt Points and $1,500 Bilt Cash. Let’s say you use $1,000 in Bilt Cash to unlock the points accelerator for the maximum 25,000 additional Bilt Points. Now you would have 195,000 Bilt Points.

If you were to take advantage of a 75% transfer bonus to Avios (when it was available), all of a sudden, you would have 341,250 Avios. Let’s say that you were able to increase your status for $75 in Bilt Cash to Platinum on Rent Day, and the transfer bonus was 100% instead of 75%. Now you can have up to 390,000 Avios, which are generally valued at 1.3 cents per point, or $5,070 all together. That can certainly make a huge difference in the cost of a vacation.

Conclusion

The Bilt Palladium Card and the Bilt Program are complicated. That is clear. But in reality, you don’t have to do all of this math to make it work for you. If you know for example, that your everyday spend is at least 75% of your mortgage or rent payment, then you will earn enough Bilt Cash to unlock the points earned from rent or mortgage. The 2X Bilt Points on all spend is enough that you can use it everywhere and not think twice about it.

If you just use the card everywhere and then log into your Bilt account from time to time to see what to do with your hotel credits and excess Bilt Cash, then that’s really as involved as you need to be. Yes, the program is complicated, but you don’t need to make it hard.

Honestly, I think that the best benefit of this card is that it keeps offering value long after the signup bonus is gone, and can make travel hacking simpler by giving people one program to worry about rather than a half dozen. It’s travel hacking for people without the time or patience to travel hack.