American Express is cutting the Avios earn rate on its British Airways credit cards from 7 October.
If you hold the £300 Premium Plus card, your everyday spending is about to earn a sixth less.
Spending directly with British Airways loses its bonus altogether, and the promised sweetener does not arrive until April 2027.
The Key Facts
- 1.25 Avios per £1 from 7 October, down from 1.5
- BA and BA Holidays spend falls from 3 Avios to 1.25
- The £300 fee is unchanged and so is the Companion Voucher
- Tier points improve on 1 April 2027 six months after the cut lands
- Barclaycard Avios Plus keeps 1.5 for £240 a year
What Is Actually Happening
Amex confirmed the change to Head for Points on 17 July. Notification letters are landing in inboxes now.
From 7 October 2026, general spending on the British Airways American Express Premium Plus Card earns 1.25 Avios per £1.
That is down from 1.5. On its own, it is a cut of roughly a sixth.
The second change is the one that actually stings.
Spending directly with British Airways and British Airways Holidays currently earns 3 Avios per £1. That bonus is being scrapped entirely.
From October, a Club World booking earns the same rate as a supermarket shop.
LoyaltyLobby put the combined effect at anywhere between 17 and 58 per cent, depending on where you spend.
The £300 annual fee is not moving. Neither is the Companion Voucher, still triggered at £15,000 of spend in a card year.
British Airways has now confirmed the new rate on its own credit cards page, so this is not a rumour.
Amex told Head for Points that it regularly reviews the benefits, rewards and costs across its products.
The company said the review was intended “to ensure we continue to meet our Cardmembers’ needs”.
There is one genuine improvement, and it arrives a good deal later.
From 1 April 2027, tier points will be earned as you spend, at a rate of 1 per £10.
The annual cap rises from 2,500 to 3,000, and the old spending thresholds disappear.
That part is a real gain. Every Premium Plus cardholder will collect some tier points, not just the heavy spenders.
But look at the two dates together. The cut lands in October. The sweetener waits until April.
BoardingGroup.One flagged that gap first: six months of paying the same fee for a weaker card.
What Cardholders Are Saying Right Now
The reaction has landed on FlyerTalk and in the comment threads of the UK points blogs rather than on social media.
He noted that the rate had been dropped “in response to cardholders needs”, which set the tone for everything below it.
“Amex have dropped the earning rate on the BAPP card in response to cardholders needs.”
nivsy — FlyerTalk — The British Airways Club, 17 Jul 2026
Their Barclaycard Avios Mastercard review went out in June. It reads very differently after this announcement.
Review: the Barclaycard Avios Mastercard credit card (2026)
— Head for Points (@HeadForPoints) June 8, 2026
Rupert puts between £50,000 and £60,000 a year through the card, roughly £20,000 of it with British Airways.
“I spend 50-60k pa on my card incl 20k with BA so this is a disaster.”
Rupert — Head for Points — reader comments, 17 Jul 2026
Not everyone is walking away. Another reader, Dave hughes, laid out a two-card combination that still stacks up for him.
His view was blunt and probably right: “Just need to do your own maths and modify the ‘game’ as required”.
What You Can Actually Do
Nothing changes before 7 October, so there is no need to do anything this week.
If you are chasing this year’s Companion Voucher, keep spending as normal. You are still earning at the old rates until then.
There is also a small timing trick worth knowing. Any large British Airways or BA Holidays booking you were going to make anyway still earns 3 Avios per £1 if you pay before 7 October.
After that, here are the routes that beat 1.25 Avios per £1.
- Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard. £20 a month, 1.5 Avios per £1, a 25,000 Avios bonus for £3,000 of spend in three months, and an upgrade voucher at £10,000. Accepted where Amex is not, including most council tax payments.
- American Express Preferred Rewards Gold. Free for a year, then £195. Headline rate is 1 point per £1, but spend bonuses at £10,000 and £20,000 lift it to an effective 1.5. Airline spend booked direct earns double.
- HSBC Premier World Elite Mastercard. 1.5 Avios per £1 on UK spend and arguably the highest earner going, but you need an HSBC Premier account, which means £100,000 invested or a £100,000 salary paid in.
- Nectar Credit Card from American Express. £30 a year after a free first year. It earns 2 Nectar points per £1, worth 1.25 Avios, but hold the points and convert during one of the frequent 20 per cent bonuses to reach 1.5.
- Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard. £160 a year for 1.5 Virgin Points per £1 and a voucher worth 75,000 points at £10,000 of spend, if you are willing to move out of the Avios ecosystem.
One important caveat. None of these five earn you a British Airways Companion Voucher or Club tier points.
So the honest question is not which card earns most. It is whether the voucher is worth £300 to you.
If you use it in Club World or First, it almost certainly still is. The Premium Plus voucher runs two years and works in every cabin.
If you have only ever redeemed it in economy, the free BA Amex gives you a voucher too, and the maths has just moved against you.
What You Are Owed
Let us be straight about this. There is no compensation scheme for a credit card devaluation.
No regulator will hand you Avios back, and Amex is entitled to change its terms with notice, which it has given.
But you do have two things worth knowing about, and both are easy to overlook.
The first is your annual fee. Amex refunds the Premium Plus fee pro rata if you cancel or downgrade partway through the card year.
Head for Points notes that Amex planned to remove pro rata refunds back in 2024 and dropped the idea. It still applies today.
So if you decide the card no longer works, you are not writing off the whole £300.
Your Pro Rata Fee Refund
Cancel or downgrade the Premium Plus card partway through your card year and Amex refunds the unused portion of the fee.
The annual fee, refunded in proportion to the months you have not used.
The second is your Companion Voucher, and this is where most people get nervous unnecessarily.
Once the voucher has landed in your British Airways Club account, it belongs to you.
Cancelling the card does not claw it back. The voucher keeps its own expiry date and sits there until you use it.
The only catch is that you need an American Express card, any American Express card, to pay for the booking when you redeem it.
That is why downgrading to the free BA Amex is the safer move than closing the account outright.
One warning from Rob Burgess at Head for Points is worth heeding if you are planning to game the upgrade cycle.
He confirmed that “Amex has started to block people repeatedly up/downgrading”, so a trick that works once may not work twice.
Why This Keeps Happening
This is not a one-off, and that is the part worth paying attention to.
Six days after the Premium Plus announcement, the same cut appeared on the British Airways American Express Accelerating Business Card.
The small business version drops to 1.25 Avios per £1 on the same date, 7 October.
It also loses On Business points entirely, which for a company card is a considerably deeper wound.
Points Well Made, which reported it, counted this as the fourth cut in eight months and called it “a blatant cut and a devaluation”.
There is a pattern here that any co-brand cardholder will recognise.
The point of an airline credit card is that it pays you to stay loyal to that airline.
Remove the bonus on airline spending and you have removed the reason to route airline spending through it.
After October, there is no earning advantage at all to paying for a BA flight with a BA card.
The timing has not gone unnoticed either. This is the twenty-fifth year of the British Airways and American Express partnership.
The announcement also landed the same week British Airways was apologising for a booking failure on its anniversary flight.
You can read the confirmed terms on the British Airways credit cards page.
If you hold the Premium Plus card, you have until 7 October to earn at the old rates and to decide what happens next.
For most people the answer is not to cancel but to add. Keep the card for the voucher, and put the rest of your spending somewhere that still pays 1.5.
