Bilt 2.0 Card Details: Bilt Blue Card, Bilt Obsidian Card, and Bilt Palladium Card

The big day is finally here and we have details on the new Bilt Blue Card, Bilt Obsidian Card, and Bilt Palladium Card.

Seems much of the rumors were true, though we have many more details now. Perhaps the Versions 2 and 3 were designed to throw us off the trail? In any event, here are the real details.

Bilt Palladium Card

Annual fee: $495

• Welcome bonus: 50,000 point sign-up bonus after $4,000 of non-housing spend in the first 3 months + Gold elite status. And, $300 Bilt Cash when you apply and get approved. This welcome bonus is available to everyone including current Bilt Mastercard® holders converting to the new card.
• Earns 2X plus 4% Bilt Cash on everything.
• There will be a limited edition mirror finish version of the card (limited quantities will be available).
• $400 Bilt Travel portal hotel credit (split semi-annually per calendar year) – requires 2 night minimum but no minimum $ value.
• $200 Bilt cash (annual)
• No foreign transaction fees
  
• Priority Pass
• Unlimited 1X points on rent and mortgage payments. Note that you need to “pay” for the points using Bilt Cash at a rate of $30 Bilt Cash per $1,000 in rent or mortgage. You can also choose to not earn points on some or all of the transaction, forgoing points for that portion of the transaction, or elect to pay a 3% fee.
• Additional benefits: Cellular Wireless Telephone Protection, Purchase Assurance, MasterRental Coverage, Trip Cancellation and Interruption Protection, Trip Delay Reimbursement, Extended Warranty, Baggage Delay Insurance, Lost or Damaged Luggage Insurance, Price Drop Protection.

Bilt Obsidian Card

Annual Fee: $95

• Welcome bonus: $200 of Bilt Cash when you apply and get approved. This welcome bonus is available to everyone including current Bilt Mastercard® holders converting to the new card.
• Unlimited 1X points on rent and mortgage payments. Note that you need to “pay” for the points using Bilt Cash at a rate of $30 Bilt Cash per $1,000 in rent or mortgage. You can also choose to not earn points on some or all of the transaction, forgoing points for that portion of the transaction, or elect to pay a 3% fee.
• Base earn rate: 1X points + 4% back in Bilt Cash on everyday purchases
• 3X points on your choice of dining or grocery* + 4% back in Bilt Cash (*Up to $25K/year)
• 2X points on travel + 4% back in Bilt Cash
• $100 Bilt travel portal hotel credit (split semi-annually per calendar year) – requires 2 night minimum but no minimum $ value.
• No foreign transaction fees
• Additional benefits: Cellular Wireless Telephone Protection, Purchase Assurance, MasterRental Coverage, Trip Cancellation and Interruption Protection, Trip Delay Reimbursement, Extended Warranty

Bilt Blue Card

• Welcome bonus: $100 of Bilt Cash when you apply and are approved. This welcome bonus is available to everyone including current Bilt Mastercard® holders converting to the new card.
• Base earn rate: 1X points + 4% back in Bilt Cash on everyday purchases
  
• Unlimited 1X points on rent and mortgage payments. Note that you need to “pay” for the points using Bilt Cash at a rate of $30 Bilt Cash per $1,000 in rent or mortgage. You can also choose to not earn points on some or all of the transaction, forgoing points for that portion of the transaction, or elect to pay a 3% fee.
• No foreign transaction fees
• Additional benefits: Cellular Wireless Telephone Protection, Purchase Assurance, MasterRental Coverage, Trip Cancellation and Interruption Protection, Trip Delay Reimbursement

How Paying Rent to Earn Bilt Points Changes

There is a ton to unpack here. 

The first and biggest change is obviously the rent and mortgage payments. Technically, there is no fee to continue to use your Bilt credit card to pay your rent (and now mortgage). There is no longer any cap (there was previously a $100,000 a year cap). And you can pay rent or mortgages on multiple properties as long as they are not commercial.

However, there is a new 3% fee, which can be covered by Bilt Cash or a payment, to earn rewards. There are no minimums in terms of how much Bilt Cash you need to apply it.

You can set this to run automatically, using whatever Bilt Cash you have accrued in whole or in part. There will be options to use Bilt Cash automatically up to the amount needed for 1% on the full amount or to pay the 3% or mix and match. In a scenario where you have $30 in Bilt Cash and a $2,000 payment (which would need $60 of Bilt Cash), and you elect to use your $30 and not pay any fees, you would earn 1X on $1,000 and 0X on $1,000, for a blended 0.5X. Therefore, the real earn rate is technically 0X – 1X, but there’s an opportunity cost – your Bilt Cash.

I’ll note in this section that you will be able to pay rent to anyone and mortgages to anyone – no restrictions – as long as it is a personal lease or mortgage. 

Another benefit in 2.0? Your rent or mortgage payment won’t come out of your card’s credit line. That is huge for people with high rent or mortgage payments as you aren’t tying up a significant percentage of your line / utilization for that payment.

Bilt Cash

We don’t know everything about Bilt Cash yet. We know you will be able to spend it as above, for rent/mortgage earnings. You can also spend it on “fitness classes, hotel bookings, Home Delivery orders, rideshare, and more.” Part of the “and more” is known to include using Bilt Cash to unlock one-time status upgrades for transfer bonuses, early access to member experiences.

To me, this is both the genius of Bilt Cash, but also a bit of a bummer. You see, let’s say I earn $90 in Bilt Cash and I have a $3,000 rent payment. I can earn 1X points on that rent in exchange for that $90. I’m paying $90 to earn 3,000 points. I value Bilt points at 1.8 cents. I’m paying $90 to earn $54 worth of points!

You see, if Bilt Cash could ONLY be spent on rent, I’d actually like this quite a bit more. But I do not like having to spend Bilt Cash that is clearly intended to be valuable elsewhere to get the rent or mortgage points when the rent payments was always the paramount *thing* about the Bilt card and Bilt itself.

While it would have been more confusing, I would have preferred it if card spend alone got banked for covering the transaction fees on rent / mortgage payments ad I separately got Bilt Cash to spend in the Bilt ecosystem.

Us miles and points folks can be “opportunity hoarders” which I don’t necessarily define as hoarding points, but rather as not wanting to spend points sub-optimally.

We need all the details of how we can spend Bilt Cash, but if I just used all my Bilt Cash to effectively buy Bilt points and then there is a Transfer Bonus multiplier I could have spent it on but now don’t have any, I’m going to be bummed!

Obviously you will also get Bilt Cash from both the Palladium sign up bonus and yearly deposits, but for high rent / mortgage areas, they are a drop in the bucket.

I get that they couldn’t sustain fee free rent transactions, but I wish the method they chose was cleaner. Even if Bilt Cash was “worth more” on rent – i.e. $1 Bilt Cash is worth $3 of Rent Transaction Fees, it would feel better.

Lastly, Bilt Cash expires on a calendar year basis which is also disappointing. You can rollover $100 in Bilt Cash each year. Let’s say you have a $10,000 payment on Dec 15th. You would earn $800 in Bilt Cash. If your rent is $4,000, you’d spend $120 of that, rollover $100, and lose $580 of Bilt Cash. I don’t see why it needs to hard expire like this… Something like March 31 of the following year would be more customer friendly given how hard it is to accrue at scale.

My 2 cents!

Thoughts on the Cards

The $495 Palladium card is probably the most intriguing owing to the 2X + 4% Bilt Cash that it earns on everything.

Using a 1.8cpp Bilt Point valuation, this is like a 7.6% return on spend assuming you spend Bilt points wisely. Of course, you can spend them “reasonably” in the travel portal for 1.25 cpp (reduces your Palladium earn rate to 6.5%) or even lower value redemptions. But if you are using transfer partners like Hyatt and Alaska, you should do well. 

Of course, you could earn 2X Citi ThankYou points from a no-annual fee Double Cash card (and have transferable points if you also have a Strata Elie or Premier), or 2X Amex points from a no fee Blue Business Plus or 2X Capital One points from a $95 Venture or $395 Venture X.

But that would be ignoring that Bilt points transfer to Hyatt and there is no card that can earn you 2X Hyatt (either directly or via a Chase Ultimate Rewards card). 1.5X would be the max, on a Chase Freedom Unlimited or Ink Unlimited paired with a Sapphire or Ink Preferred for transfers.

So with Palladium, you earn that 2X, only need one card, and have the best transfer partners all-in-one. It’s compelling when you consider that the card comes with the $400 Bilt Travel portal hotel credit (split semi-annually per calendar year) – which requires a 2 night minimum but no minimum $ spend required + the $200 Bilt cash annually.

Together you pay $495 and get back $600 and come out $105 ahead and get 2X Bilt points on everything. Now, some will groan at having to use another portal (and I’m one of them!) but at least with the Bilt portal you can look for a booking that functions as a direct booking, where you still earn loyalty points and benefits with the hotel chain. I think most will have no problem using this, but some will not want to deal with another portal, especially if you have Amex Platinum and Capital One Venture X portal credits to use already.

All of that said, with the 50,000 point signup bonus which includes $300 Bilt Cash, you are looking at around $1,200 in value from that alone. That covers two years of the annual fee.

While Bilt has not confirmed that you will be able to product change between the three cards (as of now they have only said you definitely cannot the first year), I’m personally going to go for the Palladium. Part of my thinking is that I don’t even want to decide between the dining or supermarkets for a 3X category on the Obsidian, but I have a legacy Citi Prestige with 5X on dining and the Amex Gold with 4X on groceries. While I do value Bilt points more than each of those transferable currencies, I also would be earning less.

And while I can earn 2X on everything with my Citi Double Cash, given how the welcome bonus covers my annual fee for two years, I’m inclined to use it on everyday spend like daycare at 2X (+ 4%), since that spend also counts towards Bilt status (and I do find Bilt Platinum status valuable enough that I made a point of prequalifying for 2026).’

I think I’m looking at the Obsidian card as essentially Bilt 1.0 reimagined with a token $95 annual fee (Bilt 1.0 was too rich for no annual fee, realistically) and with a thoughtful tough of choosing supermarkets or dining for your 3X. While my wallet is fat enough to have a card for nearly any bonus category I need, most of the world doesn’t carry that fat of a wallet!

And I think I’m currently viewing the Bilt Blue like any of the no annual fee cards that pretty much every issuer offers for those that are flat out not willing to pay an annual fee, but you can get the annual fee back (+$5) if you use the twice annual portal credit and then you are earning the 3X on dining or supermarkets. The 2X on travel with the Obsidian is nice, but maybe not compelling since it’s not hard to find bonus multipliers on travel.

So that’s my initial take. I’ll confess this was a lot to absorb in a very short period of time, so my views may evolve. But more importantly, what’s your take?

Links to Apply

We have all three cards on Your Best Credit Cards:

• Bilt Palladium
• Bilt Obsidian
• Bilt Blue

Thoughts?

Let me know below in the comments, on Twitter, or in the private MilesTalk Facebook group. And don't forget to follow me on Instagram for all sorts of tips on miles, points, credit cards, and travel.

If this post helped you, please consider sharing it!

You can find credit cards that best match your spending habits and bonus categories at Your Best Credit Cards. 

New to all of this? My “introduction to miles and points” book, MilesTalk: Live Your Wildest Travel Dreams Using Miles and Points is available on Amazon and at major booksellers.