Barclays Previous Cardmember Rule

What it does

Every Barclays card's reward rules carry a version of one sentence: the bonuses and incentives on that card are intended for applicants who are not and have not previously been cardmembers of that product, and if you receive a bonus you were not eligible for as a current or former cardmember, Barclays may revoke it. The consumer card pages say the same thing a second way in their offer terms - you may not be eligible if you currently have or previously had an account in that card's program. What Barclays never publishes is a clock. There is no waiting period in any of it, so a card you have held before may simply never pay its welcome bonus again, whether or not you ever earned it the first time.

How it works

• Every version of the clause is hedged. Barclays writes "may not be eligible", "may no longer be eligible" and "we may revoke", and it never writes that you do not qualify. We grade the rule medium confidence for exactly that reason.
• There is no published waiting period to wait out. Closing the card and reapplying later is not a strategy here, because nothing we can find says the bar ever lapses.
• We read the clause as covering the same card, not the whole co-brand line, because Barclays names the individual product in it. Barclays does not spell that out, so treat the sibling case as unsettled.
• The per-product reading has support inside the terms themselves: the Wyndham reward rules name the Earner, Earner Plus and Premier separately rather than treating the program as one bucket.
• Business card offers carry a broader clause on top of this one. Their Offer Availability section says the offer may not be available to you if you already hold a credit card account with Barclays, which is about currently holding any Barclays card rather than about this product.
• The Wyndham consumer offers add a broader clause too, worded around having or having had an account with Barclays at all.
• This is a bonus rule, not an approval rule. The application can still be approved; the welcome bonus is the part at risk. Separately, Barclays may decline applicants who have opened 6 or more new cards from any bank in the past 24 months.
• We have read current offer terms for 19 of the Barclays cards we track and encode the rule on those. We have not been able to read them for the Princess Rewards, Upromise, Barclays View, Mastercard Titanium, Mastercard Black, Mastercard Gold, Carnival Rewards, AAdvantage Aviator Red or AAdvantage Aviator Silver cards, so we make no claim either way about those nine.

What to do

• Take the Barclays cards you have never held first. On this issuer that ordering is worth more than usual, because a product you have already had may never come back.
• If you have held the card before, plan for the bonus not to pay and decide whether the card earns its keep without it. We rank it that way for you.
• Read the offer terms on the page you are actually applying from. Barclays writes a differently worded version of this clause for each product, and the business cards carry a second, broader one.
• If you are chasing a Barclays bonus and you hold other Barclays cards, the business Offer Availability clause is the one to check before you take the hard pull.