With Cap 1, once its bucketed its there forever. The reason, your account was part of a group of cards that were underwritten and backed by a certain group under certain terms for higher than normal credit risks. If you were part of a group that invested the high risk Cap 1 bucket, would you be ok with Cap 1 removing the "good" ones and leaving just the bad ones? Instead of making money on interest and fees, they are dealing with Charge Offs and collections lol. So at the time your card is issued its put into a "bucket". That card stays in that bucket, whatever it is. In order to remove someone from the bucket, they would have to go back to the underwriter and get them to agree to remove you from that group and then put you in a different group. And why would that underwriter agree to remove a good account and only keep the bad ones? Its easier for them to issue you another card thats has a different risk because of your increased credit profile.
Now bucketed doesnt mean you cant get increases. My "bucketed" Cap 1 card started at a $300 limit, has no fees, and is currently at a respectable $5500 CL. I got healthy increases by using it ALOT and paying it off monthly. It took about 4 months of running it up to about 80% of the limit and paying it off completely...after the 4th billing cycle I got approved for a nice increase. The last one was $1500. I have alot of other cards I want to fcous on so this will stay where it is for now and I will use it for 1 or 2 things a month just to keep something on it.
While I had a few CapOne cards in the 90s to turn of the century that were lower limits and bucketed from early credit-building days, I don't think bucketing is solely relegated to high-risk accounts.
I had a card they acquired from another lender that had a starting limit of $5300 and I could still never get a CLI, even after merging my previous older card's limits into it to make it around $10k, doing a product change to one of their higher-tier cards, and putting a fair amount of spend on it for a while to try to get a CLI. I ended up just closing that account, which was my last CapOne card other than Kohl's until Comenity sold the BJs profile to them last month. I am also an AU on a CapOne card that was opened in the 90s with a SL of $17,000 that has never been able to grow.
