Bilt 2.0 Review: What Changed, Who Loses, and Why Amtrak Has Made It Better

I’ve had the Bilt Credit Card for almost three years now.

When I first applied, it became my favorite credit card, for the same reason everyone else liked it: I could earn points on rent. It felt built (no pun intended) for people like me: renters in high-cost cities where rent is the single biggest expense.

To start 2026, Bilt announced its new lineup of “Bilt 2.0” cards.

Bilt has tried to frame this as an upgrade. But clearly, these cards are worse than the original Bilt card.

When my original Bilt card was deactivated, I had to either jump on Bilt 2.0 or let it go.

I’ll be honest, I feel like I’ve been going through the stages of grief with this card. There was denial (surely they’re not taking away THEIR MAIN FEATURE), then frustration, then resentment, then some sadness.

I think I’m near acceptance. The new Bilt 2.0 cards are a downgrade, but they’re still worth considering.

Update (October 2026). Bilt added Amtrak as a transfer partner in September, and as someone who rides Amtrak constantly, I’m stoked. I break down how it works and what it’s worth below.

What follows is my attempt to make sense of Bilt 2.0 and guide you through my thought process. I’ll also try to break down their annoying corporate-speak that made a confusing launch even harder to understand.

Why Bilt 1.0 Worked So Well (Rest In Peace)

Back in the day, like four years ago, Bilt had been the it credit card in NYC. It was on subway ads and on the tips of tongues of New Yorkers who always talk (complain) about how much they pay in rent. Their pitch was so easy: earn 1x points per dollar on rent, with no transaction fee and no annual fee. The only hard part was getting accepted for it.

That was it. No lifestyle branding required.

Bilt 1.0 felt tailored to people like me. Rent is by far my biggest monthly expense. I didn’t need to “optimize” my spend. Honestly, I put almost everything on my Bilt card. With 3x points on dining and 2x points on travel, it was a pretty good everyday card!

Well, some people gamed the system. Banks lost money. If you met the five-transaction minimum per month, you could earn points on rent without engaging beyond that.

Wells Fargo ended their deal with Bilt early. I expected Bilt to close the loopholes, but they’ve completely downgraded the card.

Okay, So What’s the Deal With Bilt 2.0?

The new Bilt cards are extremely confusing. You can read the press release yourself if you want.

If I weren’t a blogger, I would be annoyed at how much brain space this is taking up.

At a high level, Bilt now offers three cards.

• Bilt Blue (no annual fee)
• Bilt Obsidian ($95 annual fee)
• Bilt Palladium ($495 annual fee)

Every card does two things.

• It earns Bilt Points
• It earns 4% back in something called “Bilt Cash”

The key change, and this is the part that is easy to miss at first, is that you no longer earn points on rent by default.

Instead, you have to earn Bilt Cash first, and then use that Bilt Cash to “unlock” points on your rent payment.

In other words, rent is no longer the engine that earns you points. Rent has been demoted to something you can optionally earn points on if you’ve already spent enough elsewhere.

Bilt has tried to pass it off as a technical change, but it’s a big change.

The Core Problem with 2.0: It’s Hard to Earn Enough Bilt Cash to Earn the Full Rent Points

The original promise of Bilt was simple: earn points on rent. That was the whole reason to have the card.

Under Bilt 2.0, that promise is gone.

Now, to earn 1,000 points on rent, you need $30 in Bilt Cash. And the only way to earn Bilt Cash is by spending on the card. When you run the math, that works out to 1,000 points on rent for every $750 you spend. It doesn’t matter which card you have.

So while “Bilt Cash” sounds like a nice new perk, it exists to replace what we used to get automatically.

For people like me, renters in high-cost cities where we spend 30, 40 or even 50% of post-tax income on rent, the math doesn’t math.

Even if I put all of my spending on the Bilt card, I wouldn’t come close to unlocking full points on my rent.

Bilt Has Ditched the Cities for The Suburbs

The rent-burdened are the losers. Why did they target me with ads for four years if they were just gonna dump me?

The winners are those, I suppose, who don’t spend much on rent and can hit the full earnings, and those who have mortgages.

There are other annoyances layered on top. Bilt Cash expires after a year, which means you can’t even stack it long-term.

If I wanted to go back to being a digital nomad (because I’m rent-burdened), I’d be forced to spend it on whatever Bilt decides is eligible, whether that’s useful to me or not.

Then there’s the smaller but still irritating change. Rent payments no longer flow through your Bilt card at all. They come straight out of your bank account. That’s not my biggest concern, but it’s another signal that rent is no longer central to the product.

The Acceptance Phase: What is Bilt 2.0 Good For?

I’m angry. Bilt is trying to dump me. Even after I’ve said so many nice things about them on my blog. AFTER ALL THAT I’VE DONE FOR YOU, BILT.

Alright, let’s move past anger.

Is Bilt 2.0 still a good card?

If your rent is high like mine and you already know you’re not unlocking full rent points, the cleanest way to think about Bilt is that it’s not 1x points on rent anymore. It’s roughly a 1.33x boost on your everyday spend, layered on top of whatever category bonuses you’re already earning.

That’s still decent.

It’s still a no-foreign-transaction-fee card with good transfer partners.

You can transfer them to United, American, Southwest, Alaska, and a dozen more airlines. You can transfer them to Hilton as well, which includes a lot of hotels in the U.S.

The $495 annual fee card is 2X points on everything, and a bunch of credits and other goodies. (You can find that elsewhere.)

The $95 annual fee card is 3X points on dining or grocery, 2X on travel, 1X on everything else. Some smaller goodies. This is sad because those are the multipliers on the ONCE FREE Bilt 1.0 card.

The $0 annual fee card is 1X on everything.

On top of that, you get (if your rent is high compared to your spend) 1.33 extra points per dollar.

Assuming your spend is less than 75% of your rent, you get at least 2.33x on everything in the end. That’s quite good. When I put it this way, the no annual fee option sounds compelling.

They’re not bad cards. They’re confusing, and they’re not rent cards anymore. When Bilt 2.0 launched, I figured that if I didn’t already have one, I wouldn’t get it.

I’ve come around. Bilt 2.0 isn’t as good as the old Bilt, which made it easy to earn points on rent and had great multipliers. But it’s still a great card. And then Bilt added Amtrak.

Bilt Now Transfers to Amtrak, and I’m Stoked

On September 23, 2026, Bilt added Amtrak Guest Rewards as a transfer partner. It’s the first time in more than a decade that a major flexible points program has partnered with Amtrak. Chase dropped them back in 2015.

This one feels personal. In my Amtrak Guest Rewards guide, I wrote that what I really wanted was for Amtrak to let me move flexible points over to cover a train ticket. “A train-loving guy can dream,” I said. About six weeks later, Bilt made it happen.

I prefer to take Amtrak over flying. A points currency that turns into train tickets is worth more to me than any airline partner.

How the Bilt to Amtrak transfer works

The standard rate is 2 Bilt points for 1 Amtrak point, in increments of 1,000 Bilt points.

That sounds like a bad deal, since most of Bilt’s airline partners transfer 1:1. But Amtrak points are worth a lot more than airline miles. When I did the math on my own bookings, each Amtrak point was worth about 2.67 cents. Cut that in half and each Bilt point is worth about 1.33 cents in train travel.

I got the Rent Day bonus

Bilt ran its first Amtrak transfer bonus on Rent Day, October 1, 2026. The bonus depended on your Bilt status.

• Blue members got a 25% bonus
• Silver members got a 50% bonus
• Gold members got a 75% bonus
• Platinum members got a 100% bonus, or 125% if they spent $400 of Bilt Cash (a steep price for an extra 25%)

The bonus ran for one day and covered up to 100,000 Bilt points.

I’m Silver, so every 2,000 Bilt points I moved became 1,500 Amtrak points. That bumped each Bilt point to about 2 cents of train travel. Platinum members got a straight 1:1 transfer, which is the full 2.67 cents.

My last New York to Burlington coach seat cost 2,813 Amtrak points. On a normal day, I’d need to transfer 6,000 Bilt points to cover it. With my Silver bonus, 4,000 would have done the job.

I moved all 48,000 of my Bilt points on October 1. With the bonus, that became 36,000 Amtrak points, worth roughly $960 in train travel. At the normal rate, it would have been 24,000 points, or about $640. I ride back and forth to Vermont all the time, and my partner and I have been planning a cross-country Amtrak trip. This might be the time to splurge.

So is Bilt to Amtrak a good deal?

At the normal 2:1 rate, it’s okay. Points bloggers tend to value Bilt points around 2 cents each, and if you hunt for airline sweet spots (like my Avianca Rent Day transfer below), you can do better than 1.33 cents.

With a Rent Day bonus, it’s a good deal. At Silver, I was right around that 2-cent benchmark, and I got it on trains I was going to ride anyway. No hunting for award space, no flying.

It also makes everyday spending more useful. Using my math from earlier, my no-fee Bilt Blue earns about 2.33 points per dollar once you factor in rent points. Sent to Amtrak on a Silver Rent Day, that’s about 4.7% back in train travel.

So is Bilt a better way to earn Amtrak points than Amtrak’s own credit card? I ran that math in I Love Amtrak. I Don’t Have Their Credit Card. Here’s Why.

Comparing Bilt 2.0 to the Wells Fargo Autograph

Everyone with an original Bilt card got a notice in the mail that it’s automatically turning into a Wells Fargo Autograph card.

The Autograph is very strong.

• No annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, and good protections.
• Solid 3x categories: dining, travel, transit, gas, streaming, and phone plans

With so many 3x categories, it beats the no-fee Bilt Blue on a lot of my spending. So I didn’t pick one. I use both.

The Autograph gets anything in a 3x category, which for me mostly means transit and dining. I’m happy to send those Wells Fargo points to Avianca, JetBlue, or Avios.

Everything else goes on my Bilt Blue. Those points go to Amtrak or Hyatt, two partners Wells Fargo doesn’t have.

I skipped the $95 Bilt Obsidian. The Autograph already gets me 3x on dining without an annual fee, so it didn’t make sense for me.

Other Benefits of the New Bilt Card, Carried Over From Bilt 1.0

Double Points on Rent Day

Double points on Rent Day survived the switch to Bilt 2.0. It’s a nice bonus.

I still have all my subscriptions scheduled for the 1st, so they earn double points.

Watch the Rent Day Bonuses for Special Transfer Deals

One month, just for Rent Day, you could transfer points at a 1:1.5 ratio from Bilt to Avianca. I pounced on that.

I got a round-trip ticket to visit my grandpa in El Salvador for free, using only two-thirds of the points I would’ve needed otherwise.

Now that Amtrak is a partner, these bonuses are the main reason I check the Bilt app on the 1st of every month.

2x Points at Walgreens and Lyft

There are a few other niceties. I use Bilt if I get something from Duane Reade (Walgreens), because you randomly get double points there.

I also choose Lyft if it’s the same price as Uber because you get double points on Lyft. However, it annoys me that Citi Bike purchases (Citi Bike is owned by Lyft) don’t qualify.

Other Notes on the Bilt Credit Card

And here are some other notes I have on the Bilt Card.

They’re Trying to Push Other Initiatives and Build a Real Brand

For example, here in New York, they’re pushing their “Neighborhood Benefits.”

This included stuff like the “Bilt Neighborhood Comedy,” where you can use your Bilt points for a comedy show. Seems interesting. I haven’t gone. I can go to decent comedy for fifteen bucks, so I don’t feel the need to spend 2,500 or 5,000 points on a show.

They also opened a “Bilt Neighborhood Cafe” coffee shop in New York. I got 11x points there on Rent Day, and I share my experience of the cafe here. The good news is that these neighborhood multipliers stuck around with the new cards. Bilt has even added more of them, and they work on the no-fee Bilt Blue too.

They are also pushing their merch. Sorry, credit card company, but no, I don’t think your brand is cool. I just want points so I can get free travel.

The “Points Interest” is Basically Worthless

When you hit Silver status, you get to “earn interest on points.” This sounds nice, but in practice, it’s basically worthless. The interest rate is pitifully low.

I earned a grand total of 21 points last month in interest.

Don’t hold on to your points just for interest.

You Can Redeem Points for a Lot, But Traveling is Best

You can redeem points at Airbnb, Lyft, and probably a hundred other big brands. But they won’t be a great use of those points.

Bilt 2.0 Bottom Line: Still Confusing, But Amtrak Makes It Worth Using for Me

The earn-points-on-rent-without-spending party is over. The new Bilt cards are confusing, but still very good cards.

And Amtrak changes the math for people like me. Bilt is now the only major flexible points program that transfers to Amtrak. If you ride Amtrak a lot, especially if you can catch a Rent Day bonus, that’s a strong reason to have one.

If you mostly fly and don’t already have Bilt, you can probably do better elsewhere. I’ll be here spending all my money on rent and turning the rest into train rides around the country.