Barclaycard has changed its Avios rules, and for once one of them is good news

Barclays has updated some rules on its two Avios credit cards which apply from 31 July 2026.

Most of it is just a bit of housekeeping, but one of the changes is good news, for once!

A quick reminder of the two cards

There are two Barclaycard Avios cards.

The Barclaycard Avios Plus earns 1.5 Avios per £1, costs £20 a month, comes with a bigger welcome bonus and a yearly cabin upgrade voucher once you've spent £10,000.

The free Barclaycard Avios earns 1 Avios per £1, has no fee, and earns a yearly cabin upgrade voucher once you've spent £20,000.

You can only hold one of them at a time, and the welcome bonus change below applies to both.

The welcome bonus is easier to get a second time

This is the good one, so let's start here.

If you've held one of these cards before and claimed the welcome bonus, you've always had to wait before you could earn another.

Under the old rules, the clock started when you closed your card. You'd cancel the account, then wait two years from that date before a new bonus was back on the table.

The new rules move the starting point:

"If you close your Barclaycard Avios Plus card account and open a new one within two years of receiving the Avios Welcome Bonus, you won't be eligible for another bonus."

Now the two years runs from when you got the bonus, not from when you closed the card. It's a small change in wording and a big one in practice, because the clock is now ticking away the whole time you hold the card, rather than only starting once you've cancelled it.

There's a second rule that sits in tandem. Barclays only lets you hold one of its credit cards at a time, and after you close one you have to wait six months before you can apply for another. That six-month wait is separate from the two-year bonus wait. To get a fresh bonus you need both boxes ticked: six months since you closed, and two years since your last bonus.

So lets say you got your bonus 18 months ago and you're still holding the card. You close it today. Six months later you've cleared both waits at once, because it's six months since you closed and 24 months since the bonus. You can reapply, and the bonus is yours again.

Just remember that these rules kick in from 31 July.

Balance transfers and money transfers now earn Avios

This is the change that looks more exciting than it turns out to be.

First, a (hopefully) easy to understand explanation of a couple of things.

A balance transfer is when you move a debt from another credit card onto this one, and a money transfer is when you move money from your credit card into your actual bank account.

Until now, neither of these earned you any Avios.

So...

"You can now earn Avios on balance transfers and money transfers. Balance transfers and money transfers will count towards the qualifying spend amount for any welcome bonuses or other spend rewards."

So two things happen now. You earn Avios on transfers at the card's usual rate, and those transfers count towards your spending targets, both the welcome bonus and the £10,000 a year that earns your cabin upgrade voucher. But don't get too excited...

Barclaycard charge a fee on transfers, usually around 4% (check your own offer to be sure). So for every £1,000 you transfer, with a 4% fee, you hand Barclays £40 and earn 1,500 Avios on the Avios Plus. That works out at roughly 2.7p per Avios, and nobody values Avios at anywhere near that. As a way of earning, it makes no sense at all.

One more thing, you now only earn Avios on spending up to four times your credit limit in a statement period. Go past that and the Avios stop.

The new "misuse" clause, and what Barclays told us it means

This is the one that sounds ominous, so it's worth putting in its place. From 31 July, the rules include this:

"We may refuse to redeem Avios and/or authorise the issue of Avios if, in our reasonable opinion, we consider that these rules are being misused..."

We asked what "misuse" actually means.

"'Misuse' refers to activity that goes against the spirit or terms of the rewards programme, such as behaviour designed to artificially generate rewards without genuine spending..."

In other words, manufactured spending. Pushing money through the card purely to trigger rewards, without actually buying anything, which is precisely the money transfer trick from the section above.

The old rules already let it close your account and stop your Avios if it reasonably believed you'd obtained them "unlawfully", and that bit hasn't changed. What's new is broader and softer. The bar drops from "unlawfully" to the much vaguer "misused", it now covers blocking Avios you've already earned rather than just your future earning, and Barclays no longer has to close your account to act on it. That brings the wording into line with the rest of the market, where Amex can act on reasonable grounds of "material abuse" and Virgin can confiscate points obtained through "credit card abuse" at its own "absolute discretion".

So what should you do?

For most people, nothing at all.

If you're someone who cancels and reapplies to keep collecting bonuses, this is a small win.

From 31 July your two-year wait runs from when you got your last bonus, which for a lot of people brings the next one forward. Just don't move before the 31st, and keep that separate six-month gap between closing and applying in mind.

Is any of this a reason to rush out and do something today? No.

Is it worth knowing before you next think about closing or applying for one of these cards? Definitely.

Sam

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