Credit Card Bonus Points Waiting Periods in Australia — Every Bank's Exclusion Rules
By Craig McNamara · Published on 26 July 2026
If you churn credit cards, the waiting period is the rule that decides everything. Get it wrong and you apply, get approved, hit the minimum spend — and receive zero bonus points, because the fine print excluded you before you started.
I maintain a verified, per-issuer list of these rules for this site, checked against each bank's actual offer terms rather than copied from forum posts. This is the current state of play, plus the traps that catch people.
What a waiting period actually is
Every big Australian bank attaches an exclusion clause to its signup bonus. The standard wording is something like: the bonus is not available if you currently hold, or have held, a [card / rewards card from this bank] in the previous X months.
Two separate things are going on in that sentence, and conflating them is the most common mistake:
- The holding block. If you currently hold an open card from that bank (or its card family), you're excluded. Full stop. This applies at basically every issuer, even ones with no stated waiting period.
- The waiting period. After you close the card, a clock starts. Until X months have passed, you're still excluded from the bonus.
So "no waiting period" does not mean "no exclusion." It means the clock after closing is zero — the holding block still applies while the card is open.
Every bank's waiting period
These are the values I track in this site's database, extracted from each issuer's current offer terms. Where a bank publishes the clause in its offer fine print, that's the source.
| Bank | Waiting period | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| American Express | 18 months | One clock across all Amex cards |
| ANZ | 24 months | |
| Bank of Melbourne | 24 months | Shares a clock with St.George |
| Bankwest | 24 months | Stated directly in its Qantas card offer terms |
| BOQ | 12 months | |
| CommBank | 24 months | |
| NAB | 24 months | |
| Qantas Premier | 24 months | |
| St.George | 24 months | Shares a clock with Bank of Melbourne |
| Virgin Money | 12 months | |
| Westpac | 24 months | Its own clock — separate from St.George |
| MyCard (ex-Citi) | None | Holding block still applies — see below |
| ING, Macquarie, MONEYME | Not published | No verified waiting period on record |
Because these change when banks quietly update their terms, the always-current version lives on the eligibility rules page — that page reads straight from the same database, so it updates when the terms do.
The Reddit tables are wrong
There's a waiting-period table that gets reposted endlessly on r/AusFinance and points forums. When I verified each issuer's actual terms against it, several rows didn't hold up:
- It bundles Westpac with St.George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA as one "Westpac Group" clock. Corporate ownership isn't the same as bonus terms. In the actual offer terms, Westpac's exclusion is its own clock, while St.George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA share one with each other — Westpac just isn't part of it.
- It lists NAB and CommBank at 18 months. Both are 24 in their current terms.
- It claims Citi cards share NAB's clock. Citi's consumer cards are now MyCard, and MyCard's terms contain no post-close waiting period at all — it is not on NAB's 24-month clock.
- It treats Amex clocks as per-card. Amex's exclusion wording covers any Amex product, so it's one 18-month clock across the whole lineup.
If you're sequencing applications off that table, you're planning around rules that don't exist and missing ones that do.
The traps in the fine print
Group clocks. The exclusion rarely names just one card. It usually covers a family of cards — every rewards card from that bank, or every card carrying a brand. Holding one St.George card blocks the bonus on a Bank of Melbourne card, and vice versa. Amex is the extreme case: any Amex in the last 18 months blocks the bonus on every other Amex.
"Held" vs "earned a bonus." Read which verb the clause uses. Most Australian banks exclude you if you've held the card in the window — it doesn't matter whether you ever received a bonus on it. A card you held for two weeks and cancelled without earning anything still resets the clock. A smaller number of clauses key off having received a bonus, which is a much softer rule. Assume "held" unless the terms say otherwise.
The clock starts at close, not at open. If you opened a card in January 2024 and closed it in January 2025, a 24-month clock runs from January 2025. People routinely count from the application date and apply a year too early.
"No waiting period" still has a holding block. MyCard is the clean example: no post-close wait, but the terms still say the offer is "not available when closing or transferring from another MyCard branded credit card account." You can't switch between open MyCard products and collect a bonus — the exclusion just doesn't linger after you close.
Sequencing applications around the clocks
This is the operational upside of knowing the real numbers: the clocks are per-bank (or per-group), and they run in parallel.
- Track close dates, not open dates. The close date plus the waiting period is the date each bank becomes available again.
- Rotate across independent clocks. While NAB's 24-month clock is running, it has no effect on ANZ, Westpac, CommBank, Amex or Qantas Premier — each is a separate clock.
- Use the short clocks as fill. BOQ and Virgin Money run 12-month clocks, half the length of the big four's 24, so they come back around twice as often.
- Remember Westpac and St.George/Bank of Melbourne are independent. That's one more parallel clock than the viral table says you have.
- Re-check the terms at application time. These values are current as of July 2026, but banks change exclusion windows without announcement — the offer's fine print on the day you apply is what binds.
None of this requires holding fewer cards or more — it's just arithmetic on which exclusion windows are open on a given date.
The tool that does this for you
Doing that arithmetic across a dozen issuers and a real card history is exactly the spreadsheet I got tired of maintaining, so I built it into this site. The credit card eligibility rules page shows every issuer's current waiting period and group clock in one table, and if you log your card history, the site checks each offer's exclusion rules against your actual open/close dates and shows which bonuses you're currently eligible for.
