Military fee waivers (SCRA and MLA)

We record a waiver per card, with dates

A waiver lives on one card, with the month it started and, if it has ended, the month it ended. It is not one switch for your whole wallet. The cards in a wallet were opened on different dates, so two cards can get different answers, and the record has to be kept card by card.

Why the two acts need dates

The two acts use different dates. The SCRA can bring down the fee on a card you already had before you went on active duty. The MLA covers an account you opened while you were already on active duty. So what decides it is the card’s open date against your orders: opened before them, an SCRA question; opened while you were on them, an MLA question.

Coverage also ends. Under the SCRA, military service runs from the day you enter it to the day you are released (50 U.S.C. 3911(3)), so it has a start and an end. Under the MLA, what counts is whether you were covered on the day you opened the account, and the MLA stops applying to that account once you are no longer covered (32 CFR 232.3(g)(1) and (g)(4)). Someone in the Guard or Reserve can go on orders, come off them, and go back on later, which is why we keep dates rather than a yes or no about a person. A card can hold more than one period, so a Guard or Reserve member who comes off orders and goes back on records each set separately.

What we checked, and what we do not say

We looked for the published military policy of 13 card issuers and wrote down what we could read in each bank’s own words. For 6 of them we could not verify a fee waiver that way, or found nothing readable at all. Those stay unverified: we make no suggestion on their cards and publish no policy we could not read. If your bank gave you a waiver on such a card, you can still record it yourself.

If the fee shows up anyway, we show it

If your bank charges the annual fee on a card you told us is waived, we show the charge, not the $0 you entered. Some banks post the fee and credit it back on the same statement, and some charge it because the waiver has ended. Those look the same for a few weeks, so we show what we can see and point you to your bank rather than guessing.

A waived card still shows what the fee would be

A card with a waived fee still shows what the fee would be, and that number stays in the math, so you see what each card is worth before anything changes, not in the month it does.

The federal MLA database cannot answer this afterwards

The rule below tells banks that once an account exists, they cannot ask the federal MLA database whether you were covered on the day you opened it:

At any time after a consumer has entered into a transaction or established an account involving an extension of credit, a creditor (including an assignee) may not, directly or indirectly, obtain any information from any database maintained by the Department to ascertain whether a consumer had been a covered borrower as of the date of that transaction or as of the date that account was established.

The lookup site does not fill that gap. A bank can search it to see whether you are covered today, and that is all it hands back. Its own user guide says so: “NOTE: Historical information is not available through this website.” So later on, the database cannot tell anyone what your status was on the day you opened the account: the bank is not allowed to ask it, and the site shows today and nothing else. The date you went on active duty has to come from you, written down at the time, per card. That is why PointBagel asks you for a date instead of a yes or no.

To check your status as of today, use the federal MLA website at mla.dmdc.osd.mil. We never ask you for a Social Security number and we never run that lookup for you.

What this page does not tell you

Three things this page does not do:

• It does not say which banks waive a fee. Each bank publishes its own policy and changes it without notice. We keep our reading of those policies inside the product, where a row we can no longer verify shows as unverified instead of as a claim on a public page.
• It does not tell you whether you qualify, and neither does PointBagel. Your bank decides that, it can decide differently later, and nothing here is legal advice about either act.
• It does not cover who else in your household may be eligible, or how any bank treats that. The published sources disagree with one another, so we do not settle it here. Ask your bank.

If you already use PointBagel

Tell us once in your military fee waiver settings and we will offer to mark the cards it applies to. Nothing changes on a card until you confirm it, and you can undo any of it later.