Hilton Honors American Express Card Cardmember Agreement

The Hilton Honors American Express Card Cardmember Agreement filing quotes margins over Prime instead of finished rates. What that leaves knowable — and what it does not — is the subject of this analysis.

On the face of the filing

This page covers the agreement American Express National Bank filed for Hilton Honors American Express Card Cardmember Agreement. The filing runs 12 pages, and It is issued on the Amex network.

The disclosure covers a penalty rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum, a foreign transaction fee and a grace period. A purchase rate, a cash advance rate and a balance transfer rate are not stated.

Parsing confidence here is medium, so treat the figures as indicative of the filing rather than a substitute for it.

A margin over Prime, not a rate

Pricing here is disclosed in the form "Prime plus a margin". The numbers in this document are therefore the margin component only, and cannot be read as the cost of borrowing on their own.

As read from the document: 26.74 points for penalty pricing.

The practical consequence is that this card has no single disclosed price. The cost of carrying a balance moves whenever the Prime Rate moves, in lockstep and without notice, and no arithmetic on this page can tell you what it costs today.

Confidence in the parse of this filing is moderate rather than high, so the figures below are best checked against the original.

Where the fees are

No annual fee appears in the filing, in line with the roughly 75% of disclosing agreements in this index that charge nothing to hold the card.

Cash advances carry a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater. $200 is the crossover point where the percentage overtakes the $10 minimum.

No foreign transaction fee is charged, which puts this filing in the roughly 22% of disclosing agreements here that do not take a cut of overseas spending.

The downside terms

$40 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 72nd percentile of the set.

The grace period

25 days is the disclosed grace period for purchases — the interval in which paying in full costs nothing. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

What is outside the disclosure

Absent from the captured terms: a purchase rate and balance transfer terms. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

It is worth being explicit about scope: these filings record terms and pricing. They say nothing about rewards programmes, cardholder benefits, promotional offers or who the issuer will approve, and this review does not speculate about any of it.

Against the rest of American Express National Bank's filings

25 separate American Express National Bank filings appear in the corpus.

5 of the issuer's other 24 disclosing filings are likewise fee-free.

The document itself

The filed PDF is linked from this page and runs 12 pages. It is the authority for every figure summarised above; where this page and the document disagree, the document is right.

In short

Margins over Prime make this agreement legible but not priceable from the document alone. Treat the figures above as structure, and look up the current Prime Rate before drawing conclusions.