The Annual Fee Is the Part of a Premium Card That Works

American Express^[1] raised the annual fee on its U.S. Platinum Card to $895 on September 18, three months after Chase took the Sapphire Reserve to $795.^[2] The fee is the part of these cards that works: one visible price, charged once a year, that sorts customers by how much use they expect. It sorts on spending and habits. Paying $895 proves nothing about the ability to repay, so the fee is no substitute for a credit check. The part that deserves suspicion is the coupon book of credits sold with it.

Chase launched the Reserve at $450^[3] in August 2016, when the Platinum also cost $450.^[4] Amex has since raised its fee by $100 in 2017,^[5] $145 in 2021^[6] and $200 this September; Chase, by $100 in 2020^[7] and $245 this June. The consumer price index^[8] rose 34.5% from August 2016 to August 2025, the latest month published, so a $450 fee that kept pace would now be about $605. Instead, the Platinum’s fee is up 99%, or 48% after inflation, and the Reserve’s is up 77%, or 31%. Another increase as large as each card’s last would put both past $1,000. Capital One has not followed: it still charges $395^[9] for the Venture X, its price at launch in 2021.^[10]

Annual fees for new cardholders on three premium cards, 2016 to 2025

Who pays explains why issuers can charge these fees. Cardholders with annual fees of $500 or more spend three times as much as other cardholders, and three-quarters pay their balance each month, according to J.D. Power figures reported by PYMNTS;^[11] in J.D. Power’s 2025 satisfaction study,^[12] 53% of surveyed cardholders carried revolving debt. Such customers earn the issuer merchant fees at little credit risk, and they keep paying. Bank of America found that Amex’s retention rose after earlier fee increases, PYMNTS^[11] reported, and Amex’s net card fees^[13] rose 20% from a year earlier, to $2.48 billion in the second quarter, while its total revenue net of interest expense grew 9%. In 2023, CNBC reported^[14] that Delta was grappling with “long lines and crowding” at its Sky Clubs, caused partly by high-fee cardholders. Since February 1, 2025, Amex’s terms^[15] have given a Platinum holder on an eligible Delta flight 10 complimentary Sky Club visits a year. After those 10, holders may buy additional visits at $50 per person per visit, paid with the card, and those whose eligible purchases on the card reach $75,000 in a calendar year earn unlimited visits. That is priced like a phone plan: a fixed fee, an allowance and a charge for going over. The annual fee sorts who holds the card, and the $50 charge rations how often holders come back, except for the biggest spenders. A higher fee alone would not shorten the line if the holders who remained visited more often.

The strongest objection is Amex’s own. Its September 18 release^[1] counts “over $3,500 in annual lifestyle benefits” and announces app tools to “easily enroll in benefits, track benefit usage.” No holder needs all of it: one who already pays for subscriptions on Amex’s list, eats at Resy restaurants and uses Uber can collect $900 from three credits, more than the $895 fee. For that holder, Amex is right. But seven of the card’s dozen credits are capped by the month, quarter or half-year. The $900 comes in 28 windows; a holder who skips a quarter at Resy cannot claim $200 in the next. Every credit pays only on eligible purchases, which for hotels means select bookings prepaid through Amex Travel, and is worth face value only to a holder who would make them anyway. An app can track the windows but not widen them, and keeping up takes a diligence people overestimate in themselves. At three U.S. health clubs, the economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier^[16] found that members on flat monthly fees of over $70 paid more than $17 per expected visit when a 10-visit pass cost $10 a visit, and they named overconfidence as the leading explanation. Neither Amex’s release^[1] nor J.D. Power’s^[12] says how much of the credits holders collect. As fees rise, some holders are paring down the number of premium cards they carry, PYMNTS^[11] reported. Whatever they did with the credits, they noticed the price.

What limits the fee, then, is usable value. Each new capped credit makes the card harder to value, and each increase hands a rival a price to undercut. My guess is that the value pitch runs out at $999, the last three-digit price, though nothing in these figures pins the number down. Once the benefits a holder would use no longer cover the fee, the card has to be sold the way a Louis Vuitton bag is: by what it says about the person carrying it. An issuer can charge four digits for that. It will just be selling a handbag.