American Express has quietly rewritten the rules on Membership Rewards points in the US. New cards opened from now on get their own separate rewards account instead of feeding straight into your existing balance. The change appeared on the final page of the October program terms and is already in effect — your current cards are unaffected, but anything you open from here creates a fresh pot.
Why should you care? Because the old safety net no longer works by default. Until now, you could close a card and keep your points as long as any other eligible Membership Rewards card stayed open in your name. That pooling happened automatically. Under the new setup, points sit with the card that earned them. Close that card without linking accounts first, and its balance goes with it — even if a Gold or Platinum sits untouched elsewhere in your login.
The maths can be brutal. Imagine you've got 50,000 points on a Gold card, then bank 150,000 on a shiny new Platinum. If you never combine the accounts and later cancel the Platinum, that 150,000 disappears. Amex's own terms say you forfeit a rewards account's balance when you cancel its last linked product, so the test is what's attached to that specific account, not what else you hold.
The fix is simple, but it's on you. Log into the Amex website or app, head to Manage Connections, and link the new rewards account to your existing one. If the option doesn't show up straight away, call the number on your card and ask the Membership Rewards team to do it. In the case that surfaced this change, a cardholder's accounts combined within minutes even though the app warned it could take up to 24 hours. Verify the merged balance before you redeem anything or close a card.
A few wrinkles worth knowing. New York residents get a 90-day grace period to redeem forfeited points under state law, and some Corporate Cards allow around 30 days. The no-annual-fee Blue Business Plus — long a favourite trick for keeping points alive without paying a premium card's fee — still works for that purpose, but only if you remember to link it. Meanwhile, Amex is doing something harsher in India, where transfers between cards will stop entirely in November 2026.
No one outside Amex knows the motive. The cynical read: points that get overlooked or forfeited are points the bank never has to fund. There's also a hint of things to come — the new language stresses that point values can vary depending on which products are linked, echoing moves by Chase and Citi to give their pricier cards better transfer rates. If Amex follows suit, the card you hold could soon determine what your points are actually worth.
If you collect Membership Rewards points for flights and hotels, treat this as a five-minute admin task with a potentially five-figure payoff: open your account, check whether your rewards are genuinely linked, and never assume that seeing multiple cards under one login means the points are pooled. They may well not be.
