Chase Sapphire and Ink lifetime bonus rules
Chase · last reviewed 2026-08
Summary
Since June 23, 2025 each Chase Sapphire product's welcome bonus is once per lifetime per product - the old 48-month family rule is retired. A follow-up change on January 22, 2026 made each bonus independent of which Sapphire cards you currently hold. Ink cards carry their own lifetime rules.
High confidence: the issuer publishes this rule in its own terms, and it matches what applicants report.
What it does
Chase retired the Sapphire 48-month rule on June 23, 2025, replacing it with per-product lifetime language; on January 22, 2026 Chase confirmed each product's bonus is judged independently of your current holdings. Each Sapphire product (Preferred, Reserve, Reserve for Business) now carries a once-per-lifetime welcome bonus per product: you can hold all three at once and earn each card's bonus exactly once, but a bonus you earned years ago on a product blocks that product forever, with no published reset window. These are bonus rules, not approval rules - Chase can approve the application and simply never pay the bonus, and an approved personal-card application still consumes 5/24 capacity either way.
How it works
- Sapphire: each product is its own lifetime bucket. A Sapphire Preferred bonus does not block a Sapphire Reserve bonus - it only blocks Preferred itself, permanently.
- Two separate changes, often reported as one: June 23, 2025 replaced the 48-month family window with per-product lifetime language and lifted the old one-Sapphire-at-a-time holding ban; January 22, 2026 removed the remaining clause that withheld a bonus while another personal Sapphire was open. Chase's product pages did not carry the January wording until early March 2026.
- Holding counts, not just earning: Chase's terms bar the bonus if you 'previously held this card OR received a new cardmember bonus for this card' (the business card says 'have ever had this card'). So a Reserve you downgraded years ago without ever earning its bonus can still cost you that product's bonus. Chase phrases it as 'may not be available', and community data points vary, so we flag this as a caution rather than a hard no.
- Ink Cash and Ink Unlimited share ONE lifetime bucket: having ever had either no-fee Ink blocks the bonus on both. The November 2025 language extends this to any no-annual-fee Chase business card.
- Ink Preferred and Ink Premier are each standalone once-per-lifetime products (November 2025) - independent from each other and from the no-fee bucket.
- Chase's other personal and co-brand cards (Freedom Flex, United, Hyatt, IHG, etc.) use a 24-month per-product cooldown from when the previous bonus posted - not lifetime rules.
- Downgrades and closures do not reset anything - bonus history is tracked on the product, not the open account.
What to do
- Treat each Sapphire bonus as a one-shot: pick the product whose bonus you want and apply when under 5/24, since the application uses a 5/24 slot whether or not the bonus pays.
- If you've already earned a product's bonus, skip reapplying for the bonus on that product - there is no published wait that restores eligibility.
- Sequence Ink cards deliberately: the two no-fee Inks are one combined shot, while Ink Preferred and Ink Premier are each their own shot.
Want to see how this rule affects your card portfolio? Open the Application Calendar (PointBagel Pro) - it tracks the issuer rules we encode against your real applications and tells you when each one clears.