Credit limit cap per vendor by income

[Anonymous]

There are some interesting discussions going around in a couple threads regarding CL caps by income for individual vendors. KIB has a BOA thread discussing his relatively high income, utilzation, and CLI success. There is also some talk in the AMEX 35k IV thread about a potential 2/3 of income cap.

I doubt anyone can answer this question with absolute certainty (a lot of variables with scores, util, etc.) but I'd be interested to know what the highest CL expressed as a percentage of income is per vendor on an individual card. No real reason to know or care other than simple interest. For the purposes of this thread, AMEX should be discussed as revolvers only.

I'll start out with two numbers that will be quickly eclipsed. Scores are low end of super prime:

Chase: 18%

AMEX (revolver): 11%

[csryang]

Uh I misunderstood it. I thought it's total exposure but I think you meant highest CL per card 

So I updated my data:

Amex: 35%

Barclays: 35%

BOA: 15%

Chase: 29%

Citi: 10%

Capital One: 10%

Discover: 15% 

Wells fargo: 14% 

US Bank: 23%

[Anonymous]

Interesting! I'd be ridiculously excited to hit even half my income with 3 vendors. Hopefully we can get a few more to participate this time. This has the potential to be very useful for people.

Any interest in sharing a rough range for your income? I think I've mentioned my listed income before but it is 220k.

[FireMedic1]

This is cool.

Cap1 60%

Disco 14%

[Anonymous]

This is quite interesting. Capital One and Discover are the only issuers on the current list that I have cards from, so I'd be interested to get data points for credit unions such as Apple as well as Synchrony and Comenity. Anyway, it looks like right now I still have a fair amount of room left to expand on Capital One and especially on Discover.

[Jimp2323]

Are you asking about a cap per product or total liability from a company?  (My assumption would be total amout of credit issued as many individual products have hard caps regardless of a borrower's income.)

Edit:  Disregard...I went back and actually read the OP...individual card.

[Anonymous]

No worries; it is easy to miss that.

I think there is a whole 'nother conversation worth having about total exposure with a given company. Specifically, the discussions I referenced were about individual products at a pretty high percentage of income. Obviously, this wouldn't work out as well with hard product caps for reasonably high earners. NFCU can't get me above 36% and First Tech (which has an astronomically high single card limit) can't get me above 45% of W2 income on a single card.

I'm fascinated by the concept that at least some providers think that 75-100% of annual income is appropriate for a single payment instrument. I'm guessing (but not sure!) that this is drastically harder to acheive as income goes up, even though disposable income is directly correlated with increasing income. This has become the basis for the discussion, but I'm not opposed to either starting a different thread or allowing for some drift in this one. The only problem with that is there is also a fascinating discussion to be had around CLs and asset base. We'll have to save that for another time...

[Gmood1]

This is total exposure, not by single cards. Some creditors of these accounts do allow the total exposure on one card.

Citi 30% (I feel there's still room to grow here. Soup still being served)
Navy Fed 47% ( no more soup for me here)
Discover 14% (room to grow, soup kitchen closed 7 months ago for updates)
Capital One 49.5% ( no more soup)
Synchrony 100% ( room to grow.. oddly, unless the food inspector shows up and shuts it down)
BofA 50% ( think the soup kitchen is now closed.lol)
Chase 47.5% (soup kitchen closed and remodeled into a gym)
Amex 45% ( room to grow, soup kitchen still open)
NASA 38.4% ( no more soup)
Penfed 43% ( no more soup)
USAA 41% ( soup kitchen still open, 50% possible)
FNBO 14.5% ( soup kitchen open, however they give me small child portions.lol)

Blispay 11.5% ( soup kitchen never opened, they base limit off EX FICO score)

[Anonymous]

I could be wrong but doesnt' amount of income have something to do with this?  I mean I would think it would easier to get 60k from Chase if your income was 60k than to get a million dollar credit line from chase if your annual income was 1 million dollars.  Am I wrong on this?

[iced]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I could be wrong but doesnt' amount of income have something to do with this?  I mean I would think it would easier to get 60k from Chase if your income was 60k than to get a million dollar credit line from chase if your annual income was 1 million dollars.  Am I wrong on this?

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This. Higher percentages become more attainable as income approaches 0. I could have a $100,000 CL on a Chase card and still have a lower percentage than a student making effectively $0 with a $2500 CL card.

There are also limitations and risk factors the banks are looking at more than just simple income, and several of those factors only tend to become relevant at the higher incomes. One example of this is how some banks put a static cap on the limit of a card (such as $50000 for some CUs). A person making $1,000,000 a year will have a CL limit of 5% of his/her income, something that someone making $50,000 surpasses with a CL of $2,501.

If the goal is to see who has a card that's the largest percentage of their individual income, great. If it's to see where each bank's magic number on limits is, this approach is flawed from the start.