Business bank and card bonuses

The largest sign-up bonuses we track are business bonuses, and the pool of people competing for them is much smaller than for the personal equivalents. Not because they are hidden. Because most people read the word "business" and assume it means an LLC, a payroll, and a storefront.

It does not. A sole proprietorship with no employees, no registration and no separate bank account is a business to every issuer on this list, and if you have ever been paid for freelance work, sold things online, driven for a rideshare company or rented out a room, you have probably operated one. That is the whole eligibility question for most applicants, and getting it wrong in the cautious direction costs more than getting it wrong in the other.

What follows is the working difference between business and personal bonuses. The figures live on their own pages and change; the structure does not.

You are probably eligible and the application says so

Every business card application asks for a business name, a business type and a tax ID. For a sole proprietor the honest answers are your own legal name, "sole proprietorship", and your Social Security number in place of an EIN. Issuers expect this. The field is usually labelled "EIN or SSN" for exactly that reason.

The two questions people get wrong are revenue and years in business. Revenue is your actual gross receipts from the activity, and zero is an acceptable answer for a business that has not earned yet. Years in business counts from when you started the activity, not from when you registered anything. Neither field is a promise. They are inputs to a credit decision, and inflating them is the one genuinely bad idea in this entire guide.

If your activity is real and you can describe it in a sentence, you can apply. If you cannot, do not invent one.

An EIN is free, takes about ten minutes on the IRS site, and you do not need one to be approved. What it buys you is not eligibility. It is that some banks will open a business checking account for a sole proprietor with an EIN and a trade name where they would otherwise want registration paperwork, and it keeps your Social Security number off forms that pass through vendors. Get one if you are opening business checking. For a card alone it changes nothing.

Why business cards do not count toward 5/24

Chase will not approve you for most cards if you have opened five or more personal credit cards in the past 24 months. The 5/24 rule is the single biggest constraint on card bonuses, and business cards from Chase, Amex, Capital One and most other issuers do not appear on your personal credit report, so they do not add to the count.

Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways. A Chase business card does not add to your 5/24 count. It is still blocked by it. Chase checks the count when you apply for anything, including Ink cards. So the sequencing that works is business cards while you are under 5/24, not business cards as an escape hatch once you are over.

Amex is different again. Its once-per-lifetime rule tracks the specific card product, and the business versions are separate products from the personal ones. Having had a personal Gold does not burn your Business Gold bonus.

The bank side is where the money actually is

Business checking bonuses run several times larger than personal ones, and the requirements are structurally different. A personal checking bonus usually wants a direct deposit. A business checking bonus wants a balance, and often a large one held for a fixed window.

Bank of America's business checking bonus and U.S. Bank's both work this way, as does Citizens. The exact figures and windows are on each page with the date we last checked them.

The balance requirement changes what the bonus is worth to you. A personal bonus that wants a $500 direct deposit costs you nothing you were not already doing. A business bonus that wants $100,000 parked for 60 days costs you whatever that money would have earned elsewhere. At current savings rates that is real money, and on some offers it is most of the bonus. Do that arithmetic before the application, not after.

The offers that ask for transaction volume rather than balance are usually the better deal for a small operation, because a working business generates transactions anyway.

Taxes work differently and the difference is not subtle

A personal bank bonus is interest income. The bank sends a 1099-INT and you pay tax on it. That is covered in our guide on bonus taxes.

A business bank bonus is business income. It goes on your Schedule C rather than your personal interest line, which means it is subject to self-employment tax as well as income tax. The effective rate is higher.

Card sign-up bonuses earned by spending are treated as rebates rather than income, personal or business, so they are generally not taxable. But a business card rebate reduces your deductible business expense, which is a second-order effect most people miss. If you deduct a $5,000 business expense and receive a $1,000 statement credit against it, you deduct $4,000.

None of this is tax advice and your situation may differ. It is the shape of the thing so you know which questions to ask.

What a business card actually separates

Business cards report to business credit bureaus. Most do not report to your personal credit report at all unless you default, which is why they stay off 5/24. The exception is that nearly every issuer requires a personal guarantee, so the debt is legally yours even when it is invisible to your personal score.

Practically, that means a business card is a way to carry activity that does not crowd your personal report, and it is not a way to separate the liability. Read the guarantee clause. It is always there.

Business checking is a cleaner separation, and the reason to open one is not the bonus. Mixing business and personal funds in one account is what makes a sole proprietorship's books unreconstructable at tax time and what pierces the liability protection of an LLC. The bonus is a reason to pick a particular bank this month. It is not the reason to open the account.

What actually goes wrong

The failure modes are not the ones people worry about.

Nobody gets in trouble for applying as a sole proprietor with an SSN and honest zeroes. What causes problems is inflating revenue, and what causes disappointment is the funding requirement: business checking bonuses frequently need new money, meaning funds from outside that bank, and a transfer from your existing account at the same institution will not qualify. The offer page states this where the bank states it.

The other one is timing. Business bonuses tend to carry longer qualifying windows than personal ones, ninety days rather than sixty, and a longer clawback period after payout. Closing the account early to chase the next bonus is more likely to reverse a business bonus than a personal one.

Three details decide whether a large balance requirement is actually achievable, and none of them are usually in the headline. Whether the balance is an average or a minimum daily figure, because an average tolerates a dip and a minimum does not. Whether the clock starts at account opening or at first funding, which can differ by a week or more if the account opens before the wire clears. And whether the bank counts the balance across linked accounts or in the checking account alone. Each offer page records these where the bank states them, and where the bank does not state them, the page says that instead of guessing.

A monthly maintenance fee is the other thing to price in. Business checking fees run higher than personal ones and the waiver conditions are usually tied to the same balance the bonus wants, so they tend to resolve themselves during the qualifying window and then bite afterwards.

Opening the checking account first sometimes helps

Issuers weigh an existing relationship. A business checking account with a few months of real activity gives a card underwriter something to look at besides your personal credit file, and at banks that pull from the same relationship view it can turn a marginal application into an approval.

It is not a rule and no issuer publishes it as one, so do not open an account you do not want in order to game it. But if you were going to do both anyway, the checking account is the one to open first.

Where to start

If you are under 5/24 and have any self-employment activity, the business card bonuses are the largest sign-up bonuses available to you, and there is no personal-card equivalent at those levels. Start with the business card list.

If you have working capital sitting somewhere unproductive, the business checking list is ranked by bonus with the balance requirement on each row, so the trade is visible before you click through.

Every figure on those pages carries the date we last verified it against the bank's own terms. Check that date. Business offers move less often than personal ones, but when they move they tend to move a long way.