1% Cardmember Agreement

On the record for 1% Cardmember Agreement: a purchase APR of 18.49%–29.49%, no annual fee and a 15-month 0% opening period, filed by Fifth Third Bank. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 70th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

The disclosed terms

The document behind this page is Fifth Third Bank's filed agreement for 1% Cardmember Agreement. The filing runs seven pages.

The filing is explicit about a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate, an annual fee line and a late payment maximum. It is silent on a penalty rate and a foreign transaction fee.

What the promotional rate is worth

The filing discloses a 0% introductory rate running 15 months. For that window, balances covered by the promotion accrue no interest at all.

About 458 agreements in this corpus carry a zero-percent opening rate; this is one of them.

Behind the promotion sits a 29.49% purchase rate. On $2,000 that is in the region of $686 a year once the window closes.

The promotional window is therefore worth something on the order of $857 on $2,000, measured against the same balance priced at the standard rate for the same period.

Where the purchase APR sits

This is a tiered agreement: the filing discloses a purchase APR anywhere from 18.49% to 29.49%, a spread of 11 percentage points. Which end of that band applies is set by the issuer at account opening and the filing does not say how.

Read against the index, the low end ranks around the 57th percentile and the high end around the 70th — the band straddles a wide stretch of the market this corpus describes.

The agreement labels the purchase rate variable, so the quoted figure reflects the index at the time of filing rather than a locked-in price.

The rate discussed in this section is the go-to rate — the one that applies once the promotional period described below has ended, not the promotional rate itself.

What the rate means in dollars

At the disclosed purchase APR, $1,200 revolving for a full year costs something like $411 in interest.

On a median-priced agreement from this index (21.99%) the same $1,200 would run about $295 a year, so this card costs in the region of $116 more annually for the identical balance.

Broken down to a single thirty-day cycle, the same balance accrues roughly $29.43.

Note the $1.50 minimum interest charge, which overrides the arithmetic above whenever the calculated interest falls below it.

That maths assumes a static balance and nothing else — no payments, no additional purchases, no fees folded in.

What the card costs before you borrow

The annual fee is $0. Roughly 75% of filings here that state a fee state zero, so the absence of one is unremarkable in this market.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 28.49%. Advances under roughly $200 are charged the flat $10; larger ones are charged 5%. Cash advances also tend to fall outside any grace period, which means interest typically starts on day one rather than at the end of a billing cycle.

The transfer fee is $5 or 4% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater; transferred balances then run at 18.49%. Shifting $5,000 across attracts something like $200 in fees on day one.

Penalty pricing and late fees

The maximum late fee is $41 — roughly the 89th percentile of the late fee ceilings disclosed across this index.

Paying in full

Purchases carry a 23-day grace period: pay the statement in full inside it and the purchase rate never applies. The typical filing here allows 25 days, so this one is tighter than most.

A minimum interest charge of $1.50 applies in any cycle where interest is due, which makes very small revolving balances disproportionately expensive.

What the filing does not tell you

The disclosure parsed here does not state a foreign transaction fee and penalty pricing. Those gaps are gaps in what could be read from the filing, and the PDF may well address them in prose the rate table does not capture.

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.

The issuer's other agreements

This is one of 5 Fifth Third Bank agreements collected here. Their disclosed purchase rates run from 8.74% to 28.99%, and this one at 29.49% is more expensive than 4 of them.

Where the authority sits

The original filing, 7 pages long, is linked on this page and should be read before any figure here is acted on. It is also a snapshot: issuers refile as terms change.

In short

29.49% is an unexceptional purchase rate in this collection, and the rest of the terms follow the same pattern.