Happy anniversary: the BA Amex Premium Plus will change for the worse

Twenty-five years of British Airways and American Express, and here’s the gift: a cut. On the same July morning that BA finished apologising for the anniversary flight booking meltdown, Amex confirmed it will change the BA Amex Premium Plus card, slicing the Avios earning rate on the paid card with the hefty £300 annual fee. One reader on Head for Points called the timing ‘exquisite’. That’s about right.

So let us walk through what’s actually changed, because the headline number isn’t the one that stings. Then we’ll ask the more useful question: if you’re holding this card, does Barclaycard now do the job better?

What the BA Amex Premium Plus change actually does

Two cuts land on 7 October 2026.

First, the earn rate drops from 1.5 Avios (the points currency BA and its partners use) per £1 to 1.25. That’s a cut of a sixth, near enough 17%.

Second, and this is the one that should annoy you more, the 3 Avios per £1 bonus on BA and BA Holidays spend disappears completely. It falls to the same flat 1.25. So from October, spending money directly with British Airways on your British Airways credit card earns you nothing extra. That’s a 58% cut on BA spend, and it’s a strange thing for a co-brand card to do to itself.

The £300 annual fee stays put. The companion voucher, the really valuable bit, is untouched: still two years, still any cabin.

There’s a sweetener, sort of. From 1 April 2027, the tier point cap rises from 2,500 to 3,000. Tier points are the credits that push you up the BA status ladder, and you’ll earn them steadily from your first pound rather than in lumps. More on why that helps almost nobody in a moment.

Mind the six month gap

Look at those two dates again. The cut lands on 7 October 2026. The tier point sweetener doesn’t arrive until 1 April 2027.

So there’s a six month window where you swallow the devaluation and get precisely nothing back. You pay the same £300, you earn fewer Avios, and the one improvement sits the far side of winter. Across roughly 350 comments on the Head for Points and Flyertalk sites, we didn’t spot a single person flagging this. It’s the quietest part of the announcement and not in a good way.

The 58% cut is the real story

Strip away the headline and the BA spend bonus is where the damage sits.

Think about what a co-brand card is for. It ties you to a brand and pays you to stay loyal. The BA Amex Premium Plus change sees the reward for spending with BA completely removed. Book a £4,000 Club World fare on it in November and you earn the same 1.25 per £1 you’d earn buying a sandwich.

One commenter drew the obvious contrast with the Marriott card. It recently cut its general earn rate but kept the fat multiplier on Marriott spend, because that’s the entire point of a hotel co-brand card. BA has done the reverse. After October, there’s no reason left to route BA and BA Holidays spend through this card at all. You might as well put it on anything that earns more.

Tier points won’t save it

Now that sweetener. On paper, 3,000 tier points from your card spend sounds like progress. In practice, you need £30,000 of spend to hit it, and 3,000 still doesn’t reach Bronze, the lowest rung of BA status, which sits at 3,500.

So the pitch is: spend thirty grand, forgo a sixth of your Avios along the way, and land just short of the most basic tier. To be fair, Bronze isn’t nothing. It brings free seat selection seven days out and Club check-in, and for a family of four that seat selection can save real money. But it’s a modest tier, and you’re paying for it in Avios you’re no longer earning. As a reason to hold a £300 card, it’s thin.

We’ve written before about whether the BA Club tier points system is too clever for its own good, and this doesn’t change our mind.

The voucher got worse too, without being touched

Here’s the bit nobody’s yet saying out loud. The companion voucher wasn’t touched, but its value just fell anyway.

The two-for-one voucher doesn’t create Avios. It lets a second person fly on the same Avios as the first. You still need the Avios in the first place, and a long-haul Club World pair to somewhere useful runs to around 150,000-200,00 of them. The card that’s meant to help you earn those just got cut by a sixth.

Let’s make that concrete. Say you’ve got one companion voucher and 200,000 Avios banked, enough for a Club World trip for two. The voucher is the easy half. It lets your companion fly on the same Avios as you. But you still need those 200,000 Avios in the first place. Earn them from card spend alone at the new 1.25 rate? You’d need £160,000 through the card. Almost nobody spends that. So you were always topping up your Avios from elsewhere, and now you’ll need to top up more. Cut the earn rate and you’ve cut the voucher’s real value, without ever touching the voucher. Neat trick.

If you want the mechanics of how the vouchers compare, we’ve covered the BA upgrade voucher versus the companion voucher separately. We were also able to get a good value last-minute redemption on a trip to Bodrum.

So where should the spend go?

This is where it gets interesting, because the obvious rival is now clearly ahead on the basics.

From 7 October, here’s the free-versus-paid landscape for an Avios earner in the UK.

The Barclaycard Avios Plus earns more Avios per pound than the Premium Plus, for £60 less a year, and triggers its voucher at a lower spend. On raw earning, it’s not close. The catch is the voucher type: Barclaycard’s is a cabin upgrade voucher, not a two-for-one, so it moves one booking up a cabin rather than flying a companion free. Different tools for different trips. We’ve written a full guide to the Barclaycard upgrade voucher if you want to see which suits you.

One row does still fall the Premium Plus way, and it’s the tier points. Only the Premium Plus earns them, up to 3,000 a year from October, up from 2,500 now. Neither Barclaycard offers a route to status through spending. BA and Barclaycard discussed adding one and the talks fell through. So if you’re chasing BA status – and irrespective of the change – the Premium Plus is the only card here that helps. That’s exactly why the next section argues 3,000 tier points isn’t the lifeline it sounds like.

Honest caveats before anyone cancels anything: The Amex 241 works on partner airlines like Iberia and Aer Lingus and can start abroad; the Barclaycard voucher is UK departures, BA flights only. The Premium Plus companion voucher therefore remains a strong perk for the right traveller. This isn’t a rout. It’s just that the paid Amex no longer wins the argument it used to win easily – especially for UK-based customers.

Also keep in mind, if you cancel, you can still use a companion voucher after cancelling the BA Amex under certain conditions, and the same goes for the Barclaycard voucher after cancelling.

The counterintuitive bit: Barclaycard’s free card can beat its paid one

Here’s a finding that surprised us, and it’s worth its own section because it cuts against the obvious call.

The free Barclaycard Avios earns 1 Avios per £1 and triggers an upgrade voucher at £20,000 of annual spend. The paid Avios Plus earns 1.5 and triggers at £10,000. So the paid card is plainly better at low and very high spend. But there’s a band in the middle where the free card actually wins.

Past £20,000, both cards earn a voucher. Above that point, all the paid card adds is the extra 0.5 Avios per £1, and it charges £240 a year for the privilege. At £20,000 of spend that extra half-Avios costs 2.4p each, which is a terrible price for an Avios. By our maths, the paid card only pulls clearly ahead somewhere around £32,000 of annual spend if we value Avios at 1.5p. Value them more strictly at 1p and the break-even climbs closer to £48,000.

So the rough shape is this: below £10,000, the free card, because neither earns a voucher and we save the fee. Between £10,000 and £20,000, the paid card, because it’s the only one earning a voucher. Between £20,000 and roughly £32,000, the free card again, because both earn a voucher and the paid card’s extra Avios are poor value. Above that, the paid card.

The point isn’t the exact break-even, which shifts with how we value an Avios. The point is that ‘get the paid one, it earns more’ is too lazy a rule to trust. For a big slice of normal spenders, the free Barclaycard is the smarter hold. Do your own sum before you pay a fee.

What we’re looking at

For what it’s worth, we’re leaning towards the HSBC Premier World Elite Mastercard for our own general spend. It won’t be for everyone. It earns 1.5 Avios per £1, matching Barclaycard, and costs £290. That’s £50 more than the Barclaycard Avios Plus, but £10 less than the Premium Plus. What it buys instead is flexibility: points that transfer to BA, Qatar, Emirates, Etihad and others, so we choose the airline when we redeem rather than at the checkout. After watching Amex devalue a single-airline card overnight, that optionality has obvious appeal.

There’s no upgrade or companion voucher on this one. In its place comes unlimited airport lounge access through Priority Pass, so the fee earns its keep a different way. As we do regular short-haul travel, that access alone can cover the £290. So it becomes a useful card to divert everyday spend onto once we’ve triggered our vouchers elsewhere. At that point the extra Avios and the lounge access do more work than a card sitting idle in a drawer.

Obviously, there’s no guarantee HSBC won’t cut the Premier World Elite’s benefits in turn. But the lounge access and the transfer flexibility are the whole proposition here. There’s less to chip away at without gutting the card outright, and little sense in doing so at exactly the moment ex-Amex sign-ups could be climbing. Two things to know before anyone gets excited, mind. It’s gated behind HSBC Premier, which needs a £100,000 income or £100,000 in savings, so it’s out of reach for many. And the points carry a hard three year expiry, which caps how long you can sit on them waiting for the right redemption.

The bottom line

The BA Amex Premium Plus isn’t dead because of this change. Its companion voucher is still one of the most valuable in the market, and not just because it flies two on the Avios of one. You can use it on Iberia and Aer Lingus metal too, not only BA, which opens up routes and availability the Barclaycard voucher can’t touch. If you value that voucher at more than the £300 fee, keep the card and move on.

There’s a second group who come out ahead. Anyone flying often but landing just short of Silver could find the new tier points close the gap. At 1 tier point per £10 of spend, a year of everyday spending might top you up the final stretch to a tier that actually earns lounge access and seat selection at time of booking. For these folk, there’s a clear advantage to holding the card.

But the card that used to reward BA loyalty now doesn’t, the earn rate is down a sixth, and Barclaycard does the basics better for less money. And the punchline writes itself: the 25th anniversary celebration flight takes off on 15 October, eight days after the anniversary card gets its haircut. They’ll be pouring champagne at 38,000 feet on a card that was devalued the week before.

Ultimately, this shows that BA Club membership keeps being tweaked, as we said it would in our piece on whether the BA Club tier points system is too clever for its own good. There’s no sign of the tinkering settling down. So the question isn’t whether this change makes the BA Amex Premium Plus worthless, because we can see it holds clear value in several cases. It’s whether shifting the terms halfway through a collection year erodes what trust people still place in the system. It’s another swipe at loyalty.

If you’re weighing all this up, our survey of 550 BA Club members on whether BA loyalty is still worth it is a useful gut-check, and our take on whether tax on Avios is pushing BA towards revenue-based loyalty sets out where we think this is all heading.

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