Bank of America Drops Balance Requirement for Its Relationship Rewards Program
BofA Rewards opened to all personal checking customers, removing a $20,000 three-month average balance gate and extending tiered benefits worth a stated $150 to $4,000 a year across banking and Merrill accounts.
<p>Bank of America has opened BofA Rewards, its no-fee relationship loyalty programme, to every customer holding a personal checking account. Enrollment began broadly on May 27, 2026, with the programme continuing to expand through the year.</p><p>The previous structure required a three-month average balance of $20,000 or more to qualify. Removing that gate shifts the programme from a preferred-client benefit to a default one available across the retail base.</p><p>The programme rewards the full customer relationship rather than card spend alone, spanning Bank of America banking and Merrill investing accounts. The bank states annual value ranging from $150 to $4,000 depending on membership tier and engagement, with benefits scaling as customers consolidate more of their financial activity.</p>
Why it matters for loyalty teams
Relationship-based rewards measure something different from transaction-based ones. A points programme pays for purchases; this pays for consolidation, which is a bet that the expensive problem is not getting customers to buy more but getting them to stop splitting their business across competitors. Removing the balance requirement says the bank now wants that behaviour from customers who have not yet accumulated anything, on the theory that habits form before balances do.
The transferable idea for smaller operators is the breadth of the qualifying signal. Most programmes count only the primary transaction and ignore the rest of the relationship — the service plan, the referral, the second product line — even though those are the behaviours that actually predict retention. Widening what counts usually costs nothing in reward spend and improves the programme's read on who is genuinely engaged.
What does not transfer is the claimed value range. A span from $150 to $4,000 is only credible when most of the upper figure is funded by products the customer was going to hold anyway. An operator without that cross-subsidy who advertises a comparable range is promising a top-end reward that its margins have to pay for directly.
Analysis by LoyaltyWire Editorial.