Upon noticing some upcoming spend, I decided to lob in an application for the U.S. Bank Leverage business card which currently comes with an increased signup bonus of $900 after spending $7,500 within 120 days.
I applied using my name and SSN as a sole proprietorship. I got a pending reply, and the next day an email came through congratulating me on my new card. Apparently I’ve been approved.
The only U.S. Bank card I’ve ever had was the Altitude Reserve which I had for one year back in 2017. I wasn’t sure what kind of relationship is needed to get a U.S. Bank business card, but luckily they approved me automatically without any issues.
I typically consider a new account if I can net $500+ on the signup (sometimes for less if it’s easy or has other benefits). This bonus easily cleared my threshold. As an added bonus, the card is not supposed to get report to the personal credit bureaus.
What’s also nice about the card is it earns 2% on your top two spend categories, and readers have told me that even tax payments should work for that. There are some excluded categories – see this list.
My plan is to try meeting the spend on this card with a number of large charges. I’ll try having no more than two transactions on the card per billing statement. That should give me 8 purchases to meet the spend requirement. Hopefully all of my purchases will count for the 2% earn rate.
People have said you can contact U.S. Bank and have them expedite the card. I’m going to just let it play out and start the spend whenever it comes.
Some people have reported issues with getting the $900 bonus attached, instead the reps tell them the $750 is attached. This issue was when there was a banker-specific link. We now have a public link. Hopefully – even if that was a real problem – it’s not a problem any longer with the public link. I’ll try calling in to see what they say about my own bonus since I applied with the banker link, before we had the public link.
The card’s $95 annual fee is waived for the first year. After the first year, I’ll cancel the card within 30 days to avoid paying any annual fee.