How I Cancel a Credit Card After Earning the Bonus
By Craig McNamara · Published on 26 July 2026
In my churning guide I covered the whole cycle: find the offer, hit the spend, collect the bonus, cancel, wait, repeat. The step people ask me about most is the one I glossed over — the cancel. Done carelessly, it's also the step where you can lose the entire bonus.
This is the exact sequence I run every time I close a card.
Never cancel before the bonus has actually posted
This is the rule everything else hangs off. Bank T&Cs are explicit that cancelling early kills the bonus. ANZ's Frequent Flyer Black terms, for example, say the bonus points "will not be credited... if your ANZ Credit Card Account is cancelled, suspended, transferred" before the points are credited.
And the crediting isn't instant. The same terms say bonus points will "generally be credited... within 3 months of meeting the spend criteria." Three months. So the timeline looks like: hit the spend, then potentially wait another quarter before the points exist at all.
So step one is boring: log in and confirm the bonus is sitting in a points balance you can see. Not "I hit the spend, so it's coming" — actually posted.
For cards that earn airline points directly, there's a second check. ANZ's Frequent Flyer cards sweep points out automatically — "Your Qantas Points are automatically credited to your Qantas Frequent Flyer account every month." For a card like that, I wait until the bonus has landed in my Qantas account, not just appeared on a card statement. Once the points are in the airline program, the card can't take them back.
Know which points die with the card
This is the part that catches people. There are two kinds of points, and they behave completely differently at closure:
- Airline points (Qantas, Velocity) — once transferred to your frequent flyer account, they're yours. Closing the card doesn't touch them. They follow the airline program's own expiry rules from there.
- Bank points (ANZ Rewards, Westpac Altitude, CommBank Awards and friends) — these live inside the bank's program, attached to your card account. Close the account and the clock starts, or they vanish outright.
The bank T&Cs spell this out. ANZ Rewards: "In the event your ANZ Rewards account is closed, any Reward Points that remain unused must be used within 90 days of the date of closure. Reward Points that remain unused after that period will be cancelled." Ninety days, then gone.
CommBank's travel credits are harsher: "In the event that you no longer hold an active eligible CommBank card, you will forfeit all your travel credits." No grace period.
So my rule: before I ask the bank to close anything, I empty the program. Transfer bank points out to an airline partner, or redeem them, while the card is still open. Don't rely on a post-closure grace window — some programs have one, some don't, and the terms change.
Time it against the annual fee anniversary
Most offers waive or discount the first-year fee, then the full fee hits on the anniversary. Westpac's Altitude Rewards Black terms are typical: a discounted $200 first-year fee, then "the Card Fee reverts to $295 thereafter, and will be debited to your account annually on the 12-month anniversary of the Card Fee date."
So the fee lands on a predictable date. My reminder goes in at the 11-month mark — same as I said in the churning post — which leaves a month to run this whole checklist before the second fee posts.
One wrinkle worth checking first: some offers now pay a second tranche of bonus points for keeping the card. ANZ's Frequent Flyer Black offer pays an extra 40,000 Qantas Points "for retaining the card for over 12 months," credited within 3 months of the second annual fee being charged. On an offer like that, cancelling at month 11 costs you the second tranche — so I read my specific offer's terms and decide whether the retention points beat the fee before I do anything.
The closing checklist
Once the bonus has posted and the points are safe, the actual close is mechanical:
- Move every direct debit and subscription off the card. Streaming, tolls, insurance — anything billing the card monthly. A charge that lands after you've asked to close is a mess.
- Wait for pending transactions to clear. Banks generally won't close an account with transactions in flight.
- Pay the balance to zero. Exactly zero — a stray few dollars of residual interest can keep the account technically open. If the account ends up in credit (say a refund arrived), ask for that back too.
- Cancel through the bank's actual channel. For most banks that's a phone call or a secure message in the app; some let you do it online — ANZ, for instance, has a "decrease limit or close account" page in its card management section. Whatever the channel, I ask for written confirmation of the closure and the date.
- Save the confirmation. That date matters more than people realise — next section.
The record I keep (this is what future-me needs)
Issuer exclusion rules in Australia are typically worded like ANZ's and Westpac's: you're ineligible if you "currently hold or have held" one of the issuer's cards "in the last 24 months."
Read that wording again. The clock doesn't run from when you applied — it runs from when you stopped holding the card. Your cancellation date is the start of your waiting period. If you can't remember it, you can't know when you're eligible again.
So for every card I close, I record:
- Card name and issuer
- Date approved
- Date the bonus posted
- Date the account was closed (from the bank's written confirmation)
I log all of this in my card history on this site, and it does the waiting-period maths against every issuer's current rules for me. The per-issuer rules themselves live on the credit card eligibility rules page — most fall between 12 and 24 months, and they change when banks update their terms.
What closing does to your credit file
Short version: not much, and less than applying did.
Australia runs comprehensive credit reporting, so your file shows accounts being opened and closed along with repayment history while they're open. Closing a card is a normal event on a normal file — it's recorded, and the account simply stops reporting from there. It's the application that created a hard inquiry, and that already happened months ago. Cancelling doesn't add another one.
The one situation where I'd think harder is a looming home loan application — lenders assess your total credit limits, so a closed card actually helps there. I've covered that in churning around a home loan.
No scaremongering needed. Pay everything on time while the card is open, close it cleanly, and your file is fine.
Track it, don't remember it
The whole exercise comes down to two dates: when the bonus posted (safe to cancel after) and when the account closed (waiting period starts). I stopped trusting my memory with either.
Add your card history and the site tracks your waiting periods against every issuer's current rules — the same rules published on the eligibility rules page. When you're clear to go again, it shows you which bonuses you're actually eligible for.
