Update 4/5/26: Travel rewards is now $250 for a combined $500. Will add this to our best credit card bonus page.
Rakuten is offering up to an additional $150 when applying for a Bank of America card through its portal. Rates are as follows:
- $150 for Travel Rewards
- $75 for Customized Cash
Users that have elected to receive Membership Rewards points instead of cashback will see $0 and be ineligible to earn anything.
Affiliates can sometimes earn well in excess of $500 for a successful applicant. Normally shopping portals are forbidden from offering incentives on credit cards as other affiliate partners don’t like it. Rakuten must have negotiated this deal specially with Bank of America to get around these clauses. (We don’t use credit card affiliate links on Doctorofcredit ever.)
Rakuten launched something similar with Chase that was at one point offering $300/30,000 additional points. At launch that was a smaller bonus so it’s possible Rakuten will increase these Bank of America offers. It’s important to note that this $150/$75 is in addition to the standard sign up bonuses on these cards which are:
- Customized cash: $200 + increased cashback first year
- Travel Rewards: 25,000 points after $1,000 in spend
We’ve actually try to negotiate similar increased bonuses for our readers with card networks directly before and have always been told it’s not possible due to existing contracts with other partners (we are working on a deal that would effectively pass on any affiliate commission to a charity partner). It’s great to see that Rakuten has been able to pull this off and hopefully they can expand it.
If you don’t already have a Rakuten account you can currently get a $50 referral bonus.
