The Ultimate Guide to Credit Cards
Monday, October 7, 2024

Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card: Review & Alternatives (2024)

Chase Ink Business Preferred
Adam West

Writer: Adam West

Adam West

Adam West, Managing Editor

Adam has interviewed over 1,000 finance experts since joining the CardRates team in 2016. He spearheads industry news coverage related to helping consumers achieve greater financial literacy and improved credit. He has more than 12 years of storytelling, editing, and design experience in print and online journalism and is most knowledgeable in the areas of credit scores, financial products and services, and the banking industry.

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Lillian Guevara-Castro

Editor: Lillian Guevara-Castro

Lillian Guevara-Castro

Lillian Guevara-Castro, Senior Editor

Lillian Guevara-Castro brings more than 30 years of editing and journalism experience to the CardRates team. She has worked at The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Gwinnett Daily News, Gainesville Sun, and The New York Times, where she covered demographics, consumer issues, and the business and financial sectors. Lillian has a degree in journalism and communications from Georgia State University and brings her fact-checking expertise to ensure Digital Brands content is accurate and engaging.

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Ashley Fricker

Reviewer: Ashley Fricker

Ashley Fricker

Ashley Fricker, Senior Editor

Ashley Fricker has more than a decade of experience as a finance contributor and editor, and has specialized in the credit card industry since 2015. Her credit card commentary is featured on national media outlets that include CNBC, MarketWatch, Investopedia, and Reader's Digest, among many others. She has worked closely with the world’s largest banks and financial institutions, up-and-coming fintech companies, and press and news outlets to curate comprehensive content and media. Ashley holds a bachelor's degree in multimedia journalism from Florida Atlantic University.

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Advertiser Disclosure

Once limited to boring charge cards and reserved for big businesses, the modern business credit card is now as varied and feature-packed as any consumer card on the market. Business credit cards come with rewards of all types, from cash back to miles and all the points in between, and a host of benefits that may make both your business and personal lives easier.

Easily competing for a top place among the best small business rewards credit cards is the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card. Not only does the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card offer the popular rewards points, but it also provides a number of useful benefits that busy business owners on-the-go will likely appreciate. This card may not be best for brand new businesses, however, as qualifying can be tricky.

Rewards | Signup Bonus & Benefits| Qualifying

Earn Rewards on Every Purchase

Perhaps one of the most alluring aspects of the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card is its rewards structure that allows cardholders to earn rewards points with every purchase. As is well known to cardholders of Chase’s travel rewards cards for consumers, the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card or its sibling, the Chase Sapphire Reserve®, these points are considered to be some of the most flexible travel rewards around.

And you can earn them at a pretty good clip with the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card, particularly if you travel frequently for your business or operate online. That’s because you’ll earn 3X points per dollar spent on travel, shipping purchases, internet, cable, and phone services, and qualifying online advertising purchases made with your card.

BUSINESS CARD RATING

★★★★★
4.6

OVERALL RATING

4.7/5.0
  • Earn 90k bonus points after you spend $8,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening. That's $900 cash back or $1,125 toward travel when redeemed through Chase Travel℠
  • Earn 3 points per $1 on the first $150,000 spent on travel and select business categories each account anniversary year. Earn 1 point per $1 on all other purchases
  • Round-the-clock monitoring for unusual credit card purchases
  • With Zero Liability you won't be held responsible for unauthorized charges made with your card or account information.
  • Redeem points for cash back, gift cards, travel and more - your points don't expire as long as your account is open
  • Points are worth 25% more when you redeem for travel through Chase Travel℠
Intro (Purchases)
Intro (Transfers)
Regular APR
Annual Fee
Credit Needed
N/A
N/A
21.24%-26.24% Variable
$95
Good/Excellent

One thing to note is that bonus rewards cap out once you’ve hit $150,000 in combined category purchases, after which point you’ll earn an unlimited 1X point per dollar. You’ll always earn unlimited 1X point per dollar on all other non-category purchases.

At their heart, these rewards points are so useful because they can be turned into hotel loyalty points or airline frequent flyer miles for any of Chase’s 10+ hotel and airline partners, typically at a one-to-one transfer rate. This also generally unlocks the highest per-point value, earning you cents per point in well-maximized redemptions.

Extra Benefits Include a Signup Bonus & Travel Insurance

While the everyday purchase rewards you can earn with the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card are more than enough incentive for some to sign up, the additional benefits and rewards are likely to draw in many of the holdouts. To start, the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card comes with a hefty signup bonus for meeting the minimum spending requirement in the first three months.

Screenshot of Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card Benefits -- Employee Cards

Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card users can activate employees as authorized users at no additional cost.

Though the size of the spending requirement for the signup bonus might be a bit high for businesses with few expenses, most small businesses will likely have little problem meeting the requirement. This can be particularly true for those who take advantage of the fact that you can add authorized users and receive employee cards to your Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card account at no additional cost.

Even beyond the signup bonus, the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card card has a number of fringe benefits that can make up for its $95 annual fee all on their own. This includes primary auto insurance for rental cars when you rent and drive the car for business and decline rental company’s collision insurance.

Screenshot of Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card Benefits -- Car Rental Insurance

Cardholders who use their Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card to reserve and pay for a rental car can enjoy primary insurance coverage.

Cardholders also enjoy Visa Signature® Business benefits like lost luggage reimbursement and access to roadside dispatch referral services. And get extra peace of mind with trip cancellation and trip interruption insurance should sickness, severe weather, or other covered situations impact your trip.

As Chase puts it, “You can be reimbursed up to $5,000 per trip for your pre-paid non-refundable travel expenses, including passenger fares, tours, and hotels.”

And since the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card has no foreign transaction fees, you’ll save 2% to 4% per transaction when buying in a foreign currency, both in the US and abroad. Plus you can purchase with confidence knowing you have $0 liability protection in the case of unauthorized purchases, as well as purchase protection against theft or damage and extended warranty protection on eligible purchases.

Excellent Credit Needed to Qualify

For all the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card has to offer, it’s pretty inevitable that there’s a catch — one besides the $95 annual fee, which can likely be made up in rewards by most cardholders. No, the biggest catch for most potential applicants will be qualifying, as your business will need excellent credit to have a good chance at being approved for the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card.

If your business has yet to establish its own credit — which can take quite a while for a new business — you can generally use your personal credit information to obtain a business credit card (so long as you really do have a business, of course; you generally can’t qualify for a Chase business card without one). That said, using your personal credit won’t change the basic credit requirements; Chase will still prefer to see an excellent credit score for approval.

Using your personal credit can have one major downside: Chase’s 5/24 rule. Unfortunately, the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card falls under Chase’s 5/24 rule, meaning you’ll likely be instantly rejected if you’ve opened five or more new credit accounts within the last 24 months. On the plus side, business credit cards that don’t report on your personal credit typically won’t count toward your 5/24 limit.

Reward Your Business with the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card

With such a wonderful array of rewards and benefits being offered by business credit cards these days, the biggest problem won’t necessarily be finding a credit card — it’ll be finding the right card. In the end, the simplest way to decide is to look at your business’s expenses and select the card that will best reward those purchases.

For businesses with big travel, shipping, or advertising budgets, the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card can be a valuable savings tool, offering bonus rewards in those categories on up to $150,000 in combined category purchases per year. And since those rewards come in the form of flexible rewards points, you can turn everyday business expenses into luxury travel (for business or for fun).

Advertiser Disclosure

CardRates.com is a free online resource that offers valuable content and comparison services to users. To keep this resource 100% free, we receive compensation for referrals for many of the offers listed on the site. Along with key review factors, this compensation may impact how and where products appear across CardRates.com (including, for example, the order in which they appear). CardRates.com does not include the entire universe of available offers. Editorial opinions expressed on the site are strictly our own and are not provided, endorsed, or approved by advertisers.