That tends to be all over the board. I personally have a $90,000 Bank of America card and I’m an AU on another Bank of America card with a $99,900 limit. Too lazy to do the math right now, but upper-30-something percent of income. At a certain point, it rarely scales. There are lots of posters here with significantly higher credit card limits compared to income.
My total cc limits are higher than my annual income
@K-in-Boston wrote:
That tends to be all over the board. I personally have a $90,000 Bank of America card and I’m an AU on another Bank of America card with a $99,900 limit. Too lazy to do the math right now, but upper-30-something percent of income. At a certain point, it rarely scales. There are lots of posters here with significantly higher credit card limits compared to income.
$90,000 -- straight balla!
@Anonymous wrote:I got my US Bank Cash+ Visa Signature in September 2015 with a $1000 starting limit and I think it was a visa platinum at the time. It was my first credit card. I was making $9/hr at about 24 hours per week. Sometime in Spring 2017, they sent me an offer in the mail to raise the limit to $5000, an offer I accepted by September 2017. Now they've sent me an offer saying "Great news! You may qualify for a credit line increase on your U.S. Bank Cash+ Visa Signature Card of up to $4,000 on top of your current revolving credit line of $5,000". I would currently report about 20K/year in income were I to take this up, but I wanna work on my other cards and possibly months or a year or two down the road, open another.
US Bank Cash+ Visa Signature $5000 | Chase Freedom $1500 | JCPenney $1500 | Bank of America Cash Rewards $2500 | DIscover It Cash Back $3500 | American Express Blue Cash Preferred $6000 | Chase Freedom Unlimited $1500
+1, I agree with @K-in-Boston on this one. This can be a loaded question but it's awesome to see you're already thinking about these things early on. Some of us learned the hard way (after getting denials for reasons like "sufficient credit exposure" because we were chasing cards we didn't actually want/need, but made misguided choices on how to 'beef up' a profile).
I think your question can be split in 3 more specific questions; I'll entertain two.
- What is the highest Limit to Income ratio on any single credit card?
- What is the highest Limit to Income ratio from a single bank?
- What is the highest Limit to Income ratio between all your cards?
Limit to Income on any single card -- most banks will have a certain amount they'll dole out. Some customers with denser/more favorable profiles will see themselves exceed those standards. For example Chase has a generic guideline that they like to stop giving out more money when all your Chase cards combined get to 40-50% of your annual income. If my income is $10k, with a strong profile it would not be suprising for them to hold me hostage on a card with a $5,000 limit. If I were to apply for another card it would be very common for them to say "We can approve you, but we'll need to take some cash off the $5k card to open the new one - care to proceed?" That's just a sample.
- For me my highest single card is 54% with Navy. $59,000 Flagship limit against my $108k income
Limit to Income ratio between all bank cards -- same as above this will vary by bank. Some banks focus on only letting customers get X amount of cards at set limits. Using Navy as a sample some cards cap at $50,000 and Flagship at $80,000. They might approve all of them at their max and your total exposure vs income becomes skewed.
- For me my Amex exposure is $88,000, which is 80% of my annual income, but that is across 6 cards (mixed between personal and biz)
- No single Amex card is above 30% my income
- This same process applies (to some degree) at all banks so if you 'max' out a bank, then you find another one and do it again, and again, and again
- My total exposure across all banks is $486,000 -- which is 4.5x my annual income. Depending on the bank, some conservative ones will say "You have more than enough money out there - denied" while others will say "Solid profile, here's $20,000! This will get you started with US and it's well below 50% of your total income"
I wouldn't worry much about it as a driving factor. You only get to those options by earning them, banks are not dishing these out just because you asked. If they offered it, take it - you've been doing something right. If a limit makes you uncomfortable then reject, just remember you are in a lot more control with it than the banks are (if you're building up responsibly).
Great question and hope this excessively long rant helped 