Barclays Avios Rewards: “pay in” means before tax for Premier, but after tax for the £600 switch offer

A reader got in touch with us after our Barclays Avios Rewards piece with a simple question.

(If you missed it, here’s the quick version. Barclays Premier is Barclays' premium current account for higher earners. New customers who switch can get up to £600: £450 up front, then up to five payments of £30. Once you’re in, you can add Barclays Avios Rewards for £12 a month. That gets you 1,500 Avios every month, a 25,000 Avios joining bonus, and an anniversary reward each year of 7,000 Avios or a cabin upgrade voucher.)

He earns right around £75,000 before deductions, which is the minimum for Barclays Premier. To get the £600 switch offer, when they say you need to pay in £5,000 of salary, does that mean before deductions, like the Premier requirement, or is that post-deductions, aka the amount that you receive in your account?

He rang Barclays, and then just to double check, he went into a branch (I'm shocked one existed near him).

He was told the same both times, that it’s £5,000 paid into the account. Barclays has since confirmed this to us too.

So whilst the Premier Current Account "only" requires you to have an annual salary before tax of £75,000, the switch offer needs at least £85,000, and much more once your pension and student loan come out.

This is frustrating because that’s not how the offer is presented at first.

Look at the Avios Rewards page itself. Under “How to join Barclays Avios Rewards”, Barclays says “you’ll need to have a Premier Current Account with us and either pay in a gross annual income of £75,000”. A scroll further down, the £600 offer says “switch and pay in your salary”. Same page, same words, "pay in". One means before tax. The other, it turns out, means after.

The £5,000 salary needed for the £450 sits in a footnote. And the £5,000 you need every month for the remaining £150? That isn’t on the page at all. The page just says to “keep using your account for five months”, and the footnote mentions 10 debit card payments a month. You’ll only find the monthly salary requirement in the full terms, on a different page.

So if Barclays’ own wording for Premier says “pay in” means gross, why would anyone read “pay in” for the switch offer any differently?

For full clarity, how much is £75,000 in take-home pay? About £4,500 a month, and that's if you don't put anything towards your pension, student loan or anything else

So in the spirit of transparency, here's what you’d need to actually earn to see the £5,000 that Barclays want into your account:

Your situation	Salary needed
No pension, no student loan	about £85,000
5% pension	about £90,000
Plan 2 student loan	about £95,500
5% pension and Plan 2 student loan	about £101,700
As above, plus a postgraduate loan	about £121,600

That bottom row is someone who did a master’s and pays into their pension, just like they’re told to, and they're hardly a rare species. Yet they’d need £46,000 more than Premier asks for to also get the switch offer.

On the switch offer page itself, it’s step 3 of a list, worded just like the other steps, next to an illustration of £5,000 landing neatly in an account. Later in the FAQ's it does repeat "Pay a salary of at least £5,000 into your new Premier Current Account within 30 days of opening it. But for someone who has comes from the Avios Rewards page, they could quite easily not make full sense of the requirements.

We asked Barclays for comment and they say "Premier Account eligibility and eligibility for the switching offer are separate, so a customer may be eligible for a Premier Account but not meet all the requirements of the switching offer. For the switching offer, the £5,000 minimum monthly salary payment refers to net income paid into the account. The Avios rewards page provides a summary of the offer and directs customers to the dedicated offer page before they apply." This page can be found here.

Barclays’ answer uses the word “net”. That’s the word missing from the Avios Rewards page, the footnote, the offer page and the full terms, which all just say “salary”. Meanwhile the Premier requirement, a scroll away, spells out “gross”. I just think it’s a bit cheeky for one “pay in” to mean gross and another, on the same page, to mean net.

We started Points Well Made partly because we have already made a lot of the easy mistakes to make, and I can easily see how someone could be tripped up by this one.

Sam

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