Bilt 2.0 Promises Rewards, Delivers Confusion

In 2025, American Express and Chase added layers of complexity to their premium credit cards. Now, Bilt is here to say, “Hold my beer.”

But now I’m starting to feel like a reluctant participant in a giant ongoing beta test. Other Bilt cardholders — including those who haven’t even decided whether to move to a Bilt 2.0 card — might be feeling the same way. That’s because in the days following the Bilt 2.0 launch, Bilt announced major changes to the still-brand-new rewards structure, put restrictions on benefits and left key details unclear. 

The Bilt 2.0 cards might still be worth it. But the risks are as real as the complexity.

Bilt 2.0 was introduced shortly after Wells Fargo decided to end its credit card partnership with Bilt, which was reportedly losing the bank up to $10 million per month, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bilt partnered with the Cardless platform to release three new cards issued by Column Bank N.A. with annual fees of $0, $95, and $495. This is the third bank to take over the Bilt credit card portfolio since the company’s launch in 2021. That turnover suggests Bilt is still searching for a way to make its “fee-free rewards for housing payments” model viable.

Initially, the Bilt 2.0 cards were introduced with a new value proposition. Cardholders would earn:

But details about Bilt Cash were sparse.

Bilt positioned Bilt Cash primarily as a way to “unlock” Bilt points on housing payments by purchasing Bilt points at $30 per 1,000 points, up to 1x your monthly rent or mortgage. So if your rent was $1,000, you can use $30 in Bilt Cash to earn 1,000 in Bilt Rewards. It also noted that Bilt Cash could be redeemed at a dollar-for-dollar rate with select merchants.

Then, there was the Bilt Cash expiration policy: If you have unused Bilt Cash at the end of a year, only $100 worth will roll over to the next year, while the rest expires.

Details about the “dollar-for-dollar” redemption options with select merchants remained unclear. During a public “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on Reddit, a Bilt representative repeatedly answered consumer questions about Bilt Cash with “TBD” (to be determined).

Just two days after the launch, Bilt CEO Ankur Jain released a letter introducing an entirely new option to earn rewards on housing payments based on “real and reasonable confusion about the [Bilt 2.0] value proposition — especially around rent and mortgage points.”

Ironically, this only added to the confusion.

In the letter, he announced that Bilt added an “Option 1” and “Option 2” to the rewards structure.

The new option, dubbed Option 1, introduced a tiered rewards system that lets you earn up to 1.25 points per dollar on housing payments based on how much you use your Bilt card for non-housing spending. The more you spend on everyday purchases relative to your monthly rent or mortgage payment, the higher your earning rate on housing. The tiered system replaced the 4% Bilt Cash back on everyday spending.

Option 2 — the option announced at launch — still offered 4% Bilt Cash back on non-housing spending.

Details about Bilt Cash were finally released, and they were full of restrictions, more expiration policies and spending caps when redeemed at Bilt partners like Walgreens, GrubHub and GoPuff, among others.

Essentially, you’d have to spend your way to earn Bilt Cash, which gives you the ability to buy a “coupon” to select merchants. This was in stark contrast to other cards with merchant credits that are automatically tied to the card and don’t require spending to earn them. Even worse, the Bilt Cash “coupons” would expire within a set period after being acquired, and the terms and spending caps vary by merchant.

Convoluted terms are a familiar tactic in the credit card world, often used to make offers seem more generous than they really are. Bilt Cash does exactly this: The rewards rates seem nearly too good to be true. But hurdles like expiration dates, tiers, merchant redemption caps and other restrictions increase the amount of rewards that go unused.

If you choose to earn 4% Bilt Cash back on everyday purchases through Option 2, you’ll earn $100 in Bilt Cash for every $2,500 you spend on the card. That’s a great rewards rate, but what if you forget to use it immediately after, say, a high-spending period like the winter holidays, which happen to be at the end of the year? Suddenly, that 4% may become 0%.

Using Bilt Cash to earn rewards on housing payments is an option if you want to pay your rent or mortgage through Bilt and avoid the coupon hassle. But you’d effectively be buying Bilt points at 3 cents each — a poor value, and one that makes it hard to describe this option as “fee-free.” And you still have to track the Bilt Cash for expiration.

Sure, optimizers will find ways to get maximum value from Bilt Cash. I may even be one of them. But for now, I’m exhausted after reading the various terms and restrictions for each use.

With Bilt 2.0’s new Option 1 and Option 2, you now have to do even more math to figure out how you want to earn rewards in the first place.

Option 1 looks straightforward, but its incentives aren’t.

With $1,000 in monthly rent, spending $250 on everyday purchases can earn you 500 points based on the housing multiplier. That’s a 2x points rewards rate for that $250 of everyday spending (not including the points you’d earn based on the spending category and which Bilt card you have).

But spending significantly more doesn’t increase that rate — it just dilutes it. If you spent $1,000 on everyday purchases, you’d only earn 1,250 points, or 1.25x points spent on everyday purchases.

In other words, Option 1 doesn’t reward heavy spending. It rewards spending just enough.

And even though Option 1 offers some respite from Bilt Cash’s complexity, it doesn’t completely avoid it. All Bilt Rewards members will earn $50 in Bilt Cash for every 25,000 Bilt points they earn, replacing the old milestone rewards system. And the Bilt Palladium Card earns $200 in Bilt Cash each year you pay the annual fee.

The cards are also changing in other ways.

A core benefit of being a Bilt cardholder has been the ability to earn double rewards on the first of each month on non-housing spending, a recurring promotion Bilt calls “Rent Day.” However, Bilt still hasn’t said whether the Rent Day multiplier will be in place when the Bilt 2.0 cards go live on Feb. 7.

During the Reddit AMA on Jan. 14, the Bilt representative responded to a question about this benefit by saying, “Rent Day will still exist, there will still be spend bonuses, there will still be best in class promotions – will it look like it does now? Not sure TBH.”

Meanwhile, people are applying for these cards, potentially expecting key aspects of the program to continue as usual.

During the Bilt 2.0 release, Bilt confirmed with SS that any Bilt cardholder could still choose to pay the 3% fee out of pocket to earn points on their rent or mortgage through Bilt.

It wasn’t clear from Bilt’s communications that these terms were changing. But the company later confirmed that this option will no longer be available. Now, if cardholders choose to earn Bilt Cash under Option 2, they’ll no longer have the choice to pay that 3% fee out of pocket and will only earn Bilt Rewards on the amount covered by the Bilt Cash.

My take is that all three of the Bilt 2.0 cards are viable standalone travel rewards cards without housing payments — but their quickly growing list of mathy terms and restrictions makes them difficult to recommend. This level of unpredictability and changing terms is unprecedented for a card release — and most people don’t want to feel like they’re part of a beta test.

For existing Bilt cardholders who need to decide whether to transition to one of the new Bilt 2.0 cards, I would ask: Do you want to juggle this level of uncertainty and complexity to earn what I consider to be the best transferable credit card points out there?

If the answer isn’t yes, the Wells Fargo Autograph® Card — the card you’ll be automatically transitioned to if you don’t choose a Bilt 2.0 card by Jan. 30 — is looking pretty good right now.

This page includes information about the Bilt World Elite Mastercard® Credit Card, currently unavailable on SS. The information about the Bilt World Elite Mastercard® Credit Card has been collected by SS and has not been provided or reviewed by the card issuer.