BA Amex Premium Plus Cut to 1.25 Avios: Keep or Downgrade?

If you hold the British Airways American Express Premium Plus Card and put a £5,000 BA Holidays booking on it last month, you earned 15,000 Avios. Make the identical booking on 8th October and you will earn 6,250. American Express confirmed on 17th July 2026 that it is cutting the Premium Plus earn rate from 1.5 Avios per £1 to 1.25, and scrapping the 3 Avios per £1 bonus on British Airways and British Airways Holidays spending entirely. Both changes land on 7th October 2026. That leaves roughly eleven weeks to work out whether a £300-a-year card that now earns barely more than its free sibling still deserves a place in your wallet.

What Amex actually changed

Two cuts, one date.

From 7th October 2026, everyday spending on the Premium Plus card earns 1.25 Avios per £1 instead of 1.5. Separately, the double-Avios rate on BA and BA Holidays purchases — 3 Avios per £1, long the card's standout feature for anyone who books their flying on it — disappears. BA spend will earn the same flat 1.25 as a supermarket shop.

Amex's statement to the UK points press was boilerplate: it "regularly reviews the benefits, rewards and costs" across its products. Notification emails are landing in cardholders' inboxes now, and will continue arriving over the coming weeks.

Everything else on the card is untouched. The £300 annual fee stays. The 2-4-1 Companion Voucher stays, with its two-year expiry, its validity in every cabin including Club World and First, and the additional reward availability that paid cardholders get. That last detail matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it.

There are also housekeeping changes to the free BA Amex from the same date. The Executive Club name is being retired in favour of The British Airways Club, and Amex is tightening the rule that your card account must be linked to your own BA Club account rather than a family member's. If the details Amex holds do not match the details BA holds, Amex will ask you to fix it — and has said it may cancel card accounts where the mismatch is ignored, forfeiting any Avios or Companion Vouchers that have not yet transferred across. Five minutes checking your name and date of birth match on both sides is time well spent.

The £300 question: the earn rate no longer pays the fee

Line the two BA Amex cards up as they will stand in October and the gap is thin.

• Premium Plus: £300 a year, 1.25 Avios per £1
• Free BA Amex: £0 a year, 1 Avios per £1

That is a difference of 0.25 Avios per £1. Spend £15,000 in a year and the paid card gives you 18,750 Avios against 15,000 on the free one — a gap of 3,750 Avios, bought for £300. You are paying 8p per additional Avios. Nobody values Avios anywhere near 8p.

Push spending to £30,000 and the arithmetic improves without becoming attractive: 37,500 Avios versus 30,000, a 7,500 Avios gap, or 4p per extra Avios.

The conclusion is unavoidable and worth stating plainly. After 7th October, the Premium Plus card's earn rate does not justify its fee at any realistic level of spending. The Companion Voucher is now the entire case for holding it.

That is not automatically a problem, provided you use the voucher properly. A voucher applied to a Club World redemption means the second passenger's Avios come free — you pay taxes and charges on both seats, but the points cost of the trip halves. On a long-haul business class booking that is comfortably worth more than £300. On an economy hop to Europe it is not, and the free card's economy-only voucher would have covered you anyway.

Worked examples: what the cut actually costs

How much you lose depends almost entirely on how much of your spending goes to British Airways.

The moderate spender. £15,000 a year on the card, of which £1,000 is BA flights. Today: 14,000 × 1.5 plus 1,000 × 3 = 24,000 Avios. From October: 15,000 × 1.25 = 18,750 Avios. You lose 5,250 Avios a year.

The bigger spender who books BA on the card. £30,000 a year with £5,000 of BA spend. Today: 25,000 × 1.5 plus 5,000 × 3 = 52,500 Avios. From October: 37,500 Avios. You lose 15,000 Avios — a Club Europe return, gone.

The BA loyalist. £40,000 a year with £10,000 going to BA and BA Holidays. Today: 30,000 × 1.5 plus 10,000 × 3 = 75,000 Avios. From October: 50,000 Avios. You lose 25,000 Avios annually, a third of your entire earn.

The pattern is clear enough. If you rarely spend with BA, this is a trim. If you deliberately route your flights and holidays through the card — which is exactly what the 3 Avios per £1 rate was designed to encourage — you are the one being asked to pay for this change.

For the second and third groups, the Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard deserves a serious look. It costs £240, which is £60 less than the Premium Plus, earns 1.5 Avios per £1, and comes with an annual Cabin Upgrade Voucher. At £30,000 of spend that produces 45,000 Avios against the Premium Plus's 37,500 — more Avios, lower fee. The trade-off is the Companion Voucher, which the Barclaycard does not replicate.

The one genuine improvement: tier points

Amex paired the cut with something better, though it does not arrive until 1st April 2027.

Premium Plus cardholders will keep earning 1 tier point per £10 of qualifying spend, but two things change. The annual cap rises from 2,500 to 3,000 tier points. And tier points will credit continuously as you spend, rather than landing in lumps when you cross £15,000, £20,000 and £25,000 of spending.

The second change is the more useful of the two. Under the current system, a cardholder spending £12,000 a year receives nothing at all, because they never reach the first threshold. From April 2027 they will bank 1,200 tier points for spending exactly what they were always going to spend. Every Premium Plus cardholder gets something.

At the top end, £30,000 of card spend now produces the full 3,000 tier points. Bronze status in The British Airways Club requires 3,500, so you would finish 500 short — closeable with a fairly modest amount of paid BA flying.

One caveat, and it is not a small one. This is only a benefit if you were going to spend the money regardless. Manufacturing £30,000 of card spend to buy your way to Bronze is a poor trade, and putting spending on a credit card you cannot clear in full each month is a worse one. Treat the tier points as a bonus on spending that already exists, never as a target to chase.

Why the timing has landed badly

Devaluations are rarely welcomed, but this one arrived in an unusually bad week. Amex and BA are in the middle of marketing the 25th anniversary of their card partnership, complete with a heavily promoted Avios-only celebration flight to New York — a booking process that went sideways in mid-July and generated a round of apologies. Announcing an earn rate cut days later has not gone unnoticed in the comment sections of the UK points blogs, where the response has been noticeably sharper than the raw numbers warrant.

That matters commercially, because the Premium Plus has absorbed a long run of fee increases — from £150 at launch to £300 today — without much visible damage, largely because Amex kept adding benefits to offset them. Solo use of the Companion Voucher, voucher validity on Iberia and Aer Lingus, and vouchers on flights starting outside the UK were all genuine improvements. This is the first change in a while that takes something away without an obvious sweetener attached, and the tier point change is eight months out.

What to do before 7th October

You have roughly eleven weeks of the old rates. A handful of things are worth doing inside that window.

Front-load your BA spending. Any BA flight or BA Holidays booking you were going to make in the next year earns 3 Avios per £1 if you pay before 7th October and 1.25 if you pay after.

Pro tip: If you have a BA Holidays trip pencilled in for 2027, settle the balance before 7th October 2026 rather than leaving it to the standard payment deadline. On a £4,000 booking that is 12,000 Avios instead of 5,000 — an extra 7,000 Avios for doing nothing except moving a payment date forward.

Work out whether the voucher earns its keep. The Premium Plus voucher only beats the free card's when you are redeeming in premium economy or above. If your travel is realistically economy short-haul, downgrade and keep the £300.

Check the seats you want actually exist. A Companion Voucher is worth £300 only if there is reward availability on your route, in your cabin, on your dates. Before committing to another year's fee, sanity-check what is genuinely bookable using Pointsbot's flight insights — the voucher cannot conjure seats that were never released.

Consider the sign-up-and-drop route if you are new to this. Take the Premium Plus, hit the sign-up bonus and the £15,000 spend that triggers the Companion Voucher, then downgrade to the free card and take the pro-rata fee refund. This is within the rules, though Amex has grown less tolerant of cardholders repeating the trick year after year.

Ask for a retention offer. Cardholders have reported retention offers on this card before, and a phone call before your fee renews costs nothing but ten minutes.

The takeaway

The Premium Plus has not stopped being useful. It has stopped being a good earning card. From 7th October it pays 1.25 Avios per £1 with no BA bonus, which means the £300 fee now buys you precisely one thing: a Companion Voucher valid in every cabin, for two years, with extra reward availability attached. If you fly premium cabins and use that voucher annually, keep the card and enjoy the tier points when they arrive in 2027. If you do not, downgrade to the free version or move to the Barclaycard Avios Plus and pocket the difference. Either way, get your BA spending done before 7th October — that half of the decision comes with a deadline.