Chase Let You Collect the Same Sign-Up Bonus Every Four Years. Now You Get It Exactly Once, Ever.
Chase, like most card issuers, dangled a large welcome bonus to pull in new Sapphire cardholders, with one rule limiting how often any one person could collect it: not within 48 months of the last time they'd earned it. That rule survived for years. In June 2025, Chase replaced it with something much simpler — you get the bonus exactly once, ever — because a large enough number of people had figured out how to make "every 48 months" mean "indefinitely."
A Bonus Priced as a One-Time Acquisition Cost
The 48-month rule assumed most cardholders would take the welcome bonus once, keep the card or drift away from it, and only naturally cycle back — if at all — well outside the four-year window. For most people, that's exactly what happened: a bonus collected once, a card either kept or forgotten, no repeat visits to the offer.
Churning Had Its Own Hobbyist Press
"Churning" — opening a card for the bonus, hitting the minimum spend, then closing or downgrading it and reapplying the moment the 48-month window reset — had been documented for years on dedicated sites like Doctor of Credit, The Points Guy, and One Mile at a Time. It wasn't hidden or underground; it was a well-known strategy for extracting the same one-time acquisition bonus repeatedly over a cardholder's lifetime, exactly the cost Chase had priced the offer to cover only once.
A Rolling Window Can't Tell a Churner From a Returning Customer
The 48-month rule was already a correction against pure repeat-bonus farming, but churners simply adapted around it — waiting out the window, or working the structure of Chase's two separate Sapphire products against each other. There was no clean way for Chase to distinguish that pattern from an ordinary long-term customer who happened to come back to the card after a few years away, without writing a much blunter rule.
Now It's Once, Period, for Everyone
Chase wrote the blunter rule. In June 2025 it moved to a once-per-lifetime limit per Sapphire card, and by a January 2026 refinement, tightened it further to one welcome bonus per Sapphire product, per lifetime, regardless of what other Chase cards a customer holds. The result catches the churner working the 48-month cycle and, in the same motion, permanently locks out the genuine long-time Chase customer who happened to hold a Sapphire card a decade ago, let it lapse, and would otherwise have qualified for the bonus again fair and square.
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