Link: Apply now for the no annual fee Bilt Mastercard®
The Bilt Mastercard® (review) is a valuable no annual fee card that I applied for and hold onto. This allows you to pay your rent by credit card and earn rewards, even if your landlord doesn’t ordinarily allow no-fee credit card payments. For us homeowners, you can potentially even pay your HOA this way.
There are many innovative things about Bilt, including that there’s a Bilt Rent Day promotion on the first day of each month. With it now being a new month, I’d like to post a reminder of the May 2025 Bilt Rent Day offer, which is now live. For the fourth month in a row, we’re seeing a transfer bonus, which is pretty awesome!
In this post:
Details of the May 2025 Bilt Rent Day promotion
There are a couple of aspects to the Bilt Rent Day promotion, including the ability to earn bonus points (which is the same every month) plus at least one additional promotion.
Note that Bilt Rent Day promotions are generally valid from 12:00AM ET until 11:59PM PT, so technically you have around 27 hours to take advantage of them.
Earn 2-6x Bilt points on Rent Day purchases
Ordinarily the Bilt Mastercard earns 1-3x points per dollar spent, as you earn 3x points on dining, 2x points on travel, and 1x points on all other purchases. On the first day of each month, you earn double those rewards, meaning you earn 6x points on dining, 4x points on travel, and 2x points on all other purchases (except rent, where you earn 1x points).
With this offer, you can earn up to 1,000 bonus points each month. Keep in mind that you need to use your Bilt Mastercard five times each statement period in order to earn these points. It could be worth strategically making some purchases on the first day of each month to maximize this as much as possible.
Get a 25-100% Southwest Rapid Rewards transfer bonus
We’ve just seen Bilt add Southwest Rapid Rewards as its newest transfer partner, and for the May 2025 Rent Day promotion, we’re even seeing a transfer bonus. Exclusively on May 1, 2025, Bilt is offering a 25-100% bonus if you transfer points to Southwest Rapid Rewards. The size of the bonus that you get depends on your Bilt elite status. Specifically:
- Bilt Blue members can receive a 25% bonus
- Bilt Silver members can receive a 50% bonus
- Bilt Gold members can receive a 75% bonus
- Bilt Platinum members can receive a 100% bonus
Southwest Rapid Rewards is a revenue based frequent flyer program, and generally each point gets you around 1.1-1.5 cents toward the cost of a ticket on the airline. So if you have a higher tier status, this is potentially a pretty lucrative redemption opportunity, and could get you over two cents of value per Bilt point. However, it’s not going to be useful for everyone.
Bottom line
On the first day of each month, those with the Bilt Mastercard can take advantage of the monthly Rent Day promotion. In addition to earning up to double points for purchases, for May 2025, there’s the opportunity to take advantage of a 25-100% transfer bonus to Southwest Rapid Rewards. I appreciate Bilt’s transfer bonuses, and this is one that has the potential to be quite lucrative.
Are you taking advantage of the Bilt Rent Day promotion for May 2025?
Never saw this one coming... /eye-roll
You know what would be a fun bonus? 1.2x for Hyatt transfers. Let's be real here, Hyatt partnership is why most of us have the card, especially now that American is gone (RIP; Alaska is nice but just not quite as valuable nowadays).
Reflecting on a comment to another article, adding Singapore (1:1) and Choice Hotels (1:2) would really round out Bilt's transfer partners. Separately, Bilt did a survey about a 2.0 card. I'd prefer some kind of mid-tier card like the WF Autograph Journey's reward structure (with an annual fee) over the current card. Even if they dropped points for rent.
Agreed, Fred. That's what drove me nuts about the survey... none of the options presented sounded better than the current product unless you have some sort of weird emotional connection to BILT and love giving Ankur money. The Autograph Journey outperformed everything presented (except obviously the ability to generate rent points, but now even that changing as noted by Ben last week).
Well the problem for Bilt is none of the things that users here want are going to allow them to remain in business, especially the nanosecond WF can terminate their deal. It either dies, or gets worse.
@Realist, agreed. Seems like the best move would be ditching the credit card business completely, and focusing on being a lucrative middleman payment processor, but we will see.
Not a surprise.