Chase Annual Fee Refunds

Have you just gotten hit with your Chase premium credit card’s annual fee? Now is a good time to review the card’s benefits to see if it’s still worth holding.

If you no longer want the card, you have 2 options: cancel the card or product change to a no-annual-fee card. Here’s how to make sure you get that annual fee refunded.

Canceling Your Chase Card

The Chase annual fee refund policy is consistent across it’s entire card catalog. If you look closely at your printed statement, you’ll find the policy in the Annual Renewal Notice section:

The annual membership fee is non-refundable unless you notify us that you wish to close your account within 30 days or one billing cycle (whichever is less) after we provide the statement on which the annual membership fee is billed.

Simply put, if your annual fee appears on your January statement, you have 30 days from that January statement date to cancel for a full refund. If it appears on your February (short month) statement, you have less than 30 days. You’ll need to cancel prior to your March statement.

You can cancel your account by calling the number on the back of your card or sending a secure message in the app or online. The annual fee refund will happen automatically within a few business days.

Downgrading Your Chase Card

You might decide that downgrading to a card with a lower or no annual fee is a better idea for you. For instance, you can “product change” from Sapphire Preferred to Freedom Unlimited, or from Ink Business Preferred to Ink Business Unlimited.

If you choose this route, you must call Chase customer service to product change. You cannot do so via secure message.

Chase’s annual fee refund policy is a little murkier here as it’s not publicly written. From crowd-sourced data points, I can make solidly educated guesses. And if my guesses are wrong, it’s only because I’m sharing the most conservative estimate.

For personal cards, you have 40 days from the date that the annual fee posts to your account (which always happens to be the 1st day of the month with Chase) to get a full refund. If you downgrade after the 40 days, you’ll receive a pro-rated refund.

To be clear, you can downgrade your Chase card at any time (even 11 months after your last annual fee) and still receive some portion of your that annual fee refunded.

When downgrading business cards, you receive a full refund if you do so during the month when the annual fee posts. After that, you will receive a partial refund pro-rated by month.

For example, your Ink Business Preferred annual fee posted on February 1. You can downgrade on February 28 for a full refund, but if you do so on March 1, you’ll receive 11/12 of the fee as a credit.

As with personal cards, the refund should happen automatically and appear in your account within a few business days.

Summing Up

When your annual fees post, that’s when it’s time to decide whether or not to keep the card for another year. If not, you can cancel or downgrade to a free card. Just mind the dates and timing to be sure you get a refund.