The Chase Sapphire Preferred does not include airport lounge access. There is no Priority Pass membership, no Chase Sapphire Lounge entry, and no day-pass benefit attached to the $95 annual fee. Chase's own card page lists the card's benefits in full and neither "lounge" nor "Priority Pass" appears anywhere on it.

If you came here to find out whether the Preferred gets you into the lounge before your flight, that is the answer. What follows is what the card does carry, which changed materially in 2026, and the three routes to lounge access that are open to somebody holding one.

Everything below was read on Chase's own Sapphire Preferred page on September 4, 2026.

What the Sapphire Preferred carries now

For a $95 annual fee:

  • 5x points on travel booked through Chase Travel.
  • 3x on dining, including takeout and eligible delivery.
  • 3x on gas stations, EV charging, and vacation homes at top brands. This category is new and is easy to miss.
  • 3x on top streaming services and online grocery, with exclusions.
  • 2x on all other travel, and 1x on everything else.
  • A Chase Travel hotel credit of up to $100 in statement credits each account anniversary year, for hotel stays booked through Chase Travel.
  • A Global Entry, TSA PreCheck or NEXUS application fee credit of up to $120 every four years.
  • 1:1 point transfers to Chase's airline and hotel partners.
  • Primary rental car collision coverage, trip cancellation and interruption coverage, and no foreign transaction fees.

The current welcome offer on that page is 75,000 points after $5,000 of purchases in the first three months.

Two things that changed, and that older write-ups still get wrong

The hotel credit is $100, not $50. It was $50 for years, and a great deal of published advice, including our own until this update, still says so. Against a $95 fee, a credit you actually use now covers most of the card.

The Preferred now has an application-fee credit. Global Entry, TSA PreCheck or NEXUS, up to $120 every four years. This used to be one of the clean dividing lines between the Preferred and the Sapphire Reserve, and it is not any more. Any comparison that separates the two cards on PreCheck reimbursement is out of date, and that includes the earlier version of this article.

Our guide to getting TSA PreCheck and Global Entry paid for covers how these credits work across cards.

Why the confusion exists

The question gets asked constantly because the Preferred sits one tier below the Sapphire Reserve, and the two cards share almost everything else: the same Ultimate Rewards currency, the same transfer partners, the same redemption mechanics.

They differ on fee, on credits, and on lounges. The Reserve carries Priority Pass Select and access to Chase Sapphire Lounges. The Preferred carries neither, and no amount of spending on it produces them. Our comparison of Chase and Amex lounge access sets the two networks side by side.

Three ways to get lounge access holding a Preferred

Upgrade or add the Reserve. The direct route, and the only one that produces lounge access from Chase itself. It is worth doing the arithmetic rather than the instinct: the Reserve's fee is several times the Preferred's, and the lounge benefit only pays if you are in an airport with a lounge you can actually use, often enough to matter. Our roundup of lounge-access cards runs that comparison across the market.

Hold a second card that carries a lounge network. A lounge card and a points card do different jobs, and there is no rule that one card has to do both. The Preferred remains a good earning card while something else handles the terminal. Priority Pass credit cards compared covers which cards carry the network and on what terms.

Buy the day pass. Most lounges sell single entries. For somebody who flies a handful of times a year, paying at the door two or three times costs less than the fee difference between the two Sapphire cards, and it requires no application.

The upgrade arithmetic, briefly

The question behind the question is usually whether to move up to the Reserve, so it is worth putting numbers on rather than instinct.

The fee difference between the two Sapphire cards is several hundred dollars a year. Lounge access earns that back only if three things are all true: your home airport has a lounge in the network, you can get into it on the fares you actually book, and you fly often enough for the visits to compound. Two out of three is not enough.

That is why the answer changes so sharply by airport rather than by traveler. Our Nashville lounge piece is the clearest example we have of a large airport where the Chase network simply is not present, and where a Reserve upgrade bought for lounge reasons would return nothing at all.

Against that, the Preferred's own credits are unconditional. A hotel credit and an application-fee credit do not depend on which terminal you are standing in.

On the transfer partners

One correction worth making, because the earlier version of this article carried it: Chase's partner list is published on Chase's own Ultimate Rewards pages, and partners are added and dropped without much notice.

Any list of them in an article, including ours, is a snapshot. The list on Chase's page at the moment you go to transfer is the one that governs, and it is worth checking before building a redemption around a partner you remember rather than one you have confirmed.

What the Preferred is actually for

The card earns its place on the points side rather than the airport side.

The 1:1 transfers are the reason to hold it. Chase's partner list reaches airline and hotel programs whose own award pricing is often far better than any fixed cents-per-point redemption, and the transfer is what unlocks that. What that pricing is actually worth is a question to answer in the program's own booking engine rather than from a published average.

Set against a $95 fee, a $100 hotel credit and a $120 application-fee credit every four years, the card does not need a lounge to justify itself. It needs you to use the credits.

The honest summary is that the Preferred is a first travel card and a long-term keeper, and lounge access is simply not one of the things it does. If lounge access is the requirement, the Preferred is the wrong card to be comparing, and the Sapphire Reserve or a Capital One Venture X is the conversation.

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Sources

  1. Chase Sapphire Preferred card page, read 2026-09-04: $95 annual fee; 75,000 points after $5,000 in purchases in the first 3 months; 5x on Chase Travel, 3x dining, 3x gas stations, EV charging and vacation homes at top brands, 3x top streaming and online grocery, 2x other travel, 1x everything else; "$100 Chase Travel Hotel Credit ... each account anniversary year"; "Global Entry or TSA PreCheck or NEXUS Application Fee credit ... up to $120 every four years". Neither "lounge" nor "Priority Pass" appears anywhere on the page.
  2. Chase Ultimate Rewards page, read 2026-09-04, cited for the transfer-partner list being published by Chase and changing without notice

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