Preferred Rewards no longer exists. Bank of America replaced it with BofA Rewards on May 26, 2026, and every Preferred Rewards member was mapped into the new tier structure automatically.
For most people the change was neutral or positive. For one group it is a downgrade, and the protection that has been shielding them expires around late November 2026. If your combined balance sits between $20,000 and $29,999, that deadline is yours and it is roughly three months out.
Where Your Old Tier Went
The mapping was mechanical:
Gold ($20,000 minimum, 25% bonus) moved to Preferred Plus.
Platinum ($50,000, 50% bonus) also moved to Preferred Plus.
Platinum Honors ($100,000, 75% bonus) moved to Preferred Honors.
Diamond Honors, the business-side equivalent, moved to Premier.
The new ladder runs Member (under $30,000, 10% bonus), Preferred Plus ($30,000 to $99,999, 25%), Preferred Honors ($100,000 to $999,999, 50%) and Premier ($1 million and up, 75%).
Look at those two lists side by side and the restructuring becomes obvious. The old program topped out at $100,000. The new one puts the 75% bonus behind $1 million.
Who Came Out Worse
Three groups lost ground, and they lost different amounts.
The $20,000 to $29,999 band. This is the sharpest cut. Under Preferred Rewards, $20,000 qualified for Gold and a 25% credit card bonus. Under BofA Rewards, that balance falls into Member and a 10% bonus. On $25,000 of annual card spending in a 3% category, the difference is roughly $112 a year.
Former Platinum Honors members. They had 75%. At $100,000 to $999,999 they now sit at Preferred Honors with 50%. Unless they have $1 million, they cannot get back to 75%. On $30,000 of annual spend at 3%, that is about $225 a year gone.
Former Platinum members in the $50,000 to $99,999 range. They had 50% and now sit at Preferred Plus with 25%.
The pattern is consistent: the middle and upper-middle of the old ladder absorbed the cost of extending the program to everyone else. That is a defensible trade for the bank, and it is a real reduction if you were in those bands.
The Protection Window and When It Ends
Bank of America did not apply the cuts immediately. Existing Gold and Platinum members keep their prior Preferred Rewards benefits for at least six months after the May transition, which puts the earliest possible change in late November 2026.
That is a floor rather than a promise of a specific date, and Bank of America has not published a firm cutover day. Treat late November as the point from which the old rate can stop, and check your own account for the date that applies to you rather than assuming a shared deadline.
The window matters because it gives you time to act. Once it closes, the new tier applies and the arithmetic changes with it.
What to Do If You Are in the $20,000 to $29,999 Band
You have three options, and the right one depends on numbers rather than loyalty.
Option one: get to $30,000. You need to clear the Preferred Plus threshold on a three-month combined average daily balance across Bank of America deposit and Merrill investment accounts. If you are at $27,000, you need $3,000 more, sustained rather than spiked.
The question is what that $3,000 costs you. If it is currently earning 4% elsewhere, moving it forgoes about $120 a year in interest to recover roughly $112 in rewards. That is a losing trade by a small margin, and it gets worse the more you have to move.
But if you have a Merrill account you had forgotten about, or cash genuinely sitting idle at low rates, the move is close to free and the rewards are a straight gain. Check what you already hold before deciding to move anything, since Merrill balances count and people routinely overlook them.
Option two: accept Member and adjust the card. A 10% bonus on the right card still beats a 25% bonus on the wrong one. Making sure the Customized Cash Rewards category is set to where you actually spend recovers more than the tier difference for most households. That card lets you change the 3% category once a month, and an unset or badly chosen category is a bigger leak than the tier cut.
Option three: move the spending elsewhere. If the Bank of America relationship was only ever about the Preferred Rewards multiplier, a 10% bonus may not be enough to keep your card spending there. A flat 2% cash-back card from another issuer beats 1.5% at a 10% bonus, which works out to 1.65%.
That last option is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. The tier cut changed the value proposition, and there is no obligation to keep spending where it no longer pays best.
If You Were Platinum ($50,000 to $99,999)
This band gets less attention than the others and the cut is just as real: 50% down to 25% at Preferred Plus.
On $25,000 of annual spending in a 3% category, that is the difference between 4.5% and 3.75%, or about $187 a year.
The recovery path is steeper than for the Gold band. Preferred Honors and its 50% bonus starts at $100,000, so a customer at $60,000 needs another $40,000 in combined balances to get back to where they were. That is rarely a matter of moving idle cash around.
What is worth checking first: whether Merrill holdings you already have close the gap. Investment balances count at market value, so a portfolio that has appreciated since you last looked may have moved you closer to $100,000 than you assume. This is the single most common reason people are in a higher tier than they think.
If the gap is genuinely $40,000 of cash you would have to relocate from higher-yielding accounts, do not. The interest forgone will exceed $187 comfortably.
How to Check Which Tier You Are In
Do this before making any decision, because a surprising number of people guess wrong.
Your tier shows in the Bank of America mobile app and in online banking under the rewards section. It reflects the three-month combined average daily balance across qualifying accounts, so it will not match today's snapshot balance if your balances have moved recently.
Two things to confirm while you are in there. First, whether your Merrill accounts are actually linked to the same customer relationship, since an unlinked account will not count. Second, the date your protection window ends, if you were a Gold or Platinum member, because Bank of America has communicated this individually rather than as one shared cutover.
If your accounts are not linked, that is the highest-value fix available in this entire program. Linking is administrative, costs nothing, and can move you a full tier.
The Timeline From Here
May 26, 2026. BofA Rewards launched and all Preferred Rewards members were mapped across.
May 27, 2026. Enrollment opened to Bank of America personal checking customers who had never qualified before.
Roughly late November 2026. The earliest point at which Gold and Platinum members can stop receiving their prior benefits. The six-month protection was stated as a minimum, not a fixed date.
After that. The new tier applies with no further transition, and requalification runs on the standard quarterly review.
There is no action required at any of those points. The changes are automatic. The only reason to act is if you want to change which side of a threshold you land on, and that has to happen before the protection ends rather than after.
If You Were Platinum Honors
Your situation is different and the options are narrower.
Going from 75% to 50% is a meaningful reduction, and the only route back to 75% is $1 million in combined balances. For most people that is not a decision, it is a fact about their net worth.
What is worth checking: the Preferred Honors tier added subscription reimbursement worth up to $96 a year that the old Platinum Honors did not have. It does not offset a 25-point bonus reduction on heavy card spending, but it is not nothing, and it goes unclaimed if you do not activate it.
The broader question is whether Bank of America still deserves the concentration. At 50% on a 2x travel card you are earning 3x, which is competitive with mid-tier travel cards elsewhere but redeems at a fixed rate rather than through transfer partners. Our comparison of the two ecosystems covers what you gain and give up by moving.
Why Bank of America Did This
Not to be cynical about it, but the shape of the change tells you the reasoning.
Extending a rewards program from 11 million to 30 million people costs money. Funding that by trimming the middle tiers, rather than by spending new money, is the ordinary way banks square that circle. The customers who lost 25 percentage points of bonus are subsidising the customers who gained 10.
There is a deposit-gathering motive too. Raising the top tier from $100,000 to $1 million creates a reason for high-balance customers to consolidate assets at Merrill rather than spread them across brokerages. A 75% card bonus is a cheap incentive relative to what a bank earns on $1 million of assets under management.
None of that makes the program a poor deal. It means the program is designed to move your money, and you should decide whether moving it serves you before responding to the incentive. The tier is worth what it pays you, not what it signals.
What Did Not Change
Worth being clear about, because the coverage of this transition has been heavy on the losses.
The credit cards themselves are unchanged. Base earning rates, annual fees and card benefits all stayed the same; only the multiplier on top moved. The qualification mechanic is also the same: a three-month combined average daily balance across deposit and Merrill accounts, with HSAs excluded.
And the program added things. Cash-back offers from more than 15,000 brands, loan rate discounts and enhanced fraud monitoring now apply at every tier including Member, where previously they required qualifying at all.
For the full current structure, our guide to how BofA Rewards works covers the tiers and benefits in detail, and there is a card-by-card breakdown of what each tier pays.
Bottom Line
Preferred Rewards became BofA Rewards in May 2026. Gold and Platinum both mapped to Preferred Plus, Platinum Honors to Preferred Honors, and the 75% bonus moved behind a $1 million threshold.
If you are between $20,000 and $29,999, your old 25% bonus is protected until roughly late November 2026 and then falls to 10%. Before that date, check whether Merrill balances already put you over $30,000, and if they do not, run the interest you would forgo against the roughly $112 a year the tier is worth. For a lot of people the honest answer is to accept Member and make sure the card category is set correctly instead.
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