Cooldown structures
Every bank limits how often you can earn its bonus, and the limit takes one of a few shapes. The most common is a per-product clock: you are eligible again a fixed time after your last bonus or last account. Chase is the famous example with its roughly 24 month pattern on personal checking, measured from when the prior bonus posted. Other banks run 12, 24, or 36 month clocks, and the clock can run from account closing instead of bonus payout.
The second shape is lifetime language: one bonus per customer, ever. Some banks write this plainly and some enforce it without writing it. Lifetime language makes a bank a one-shot, so save it for a strong offer rather than burning it on a weak one.
The third shape is the account-closed-within window: you are ineligible if you closed an account with the same bank in the last 90 or 180 days, or you forfeit the bonus if you close too soon after earning it. Read the offer's eligibility paragraph every single time. Banks rewrite these terms often, and the version you remember from two years ago is probably stale.
- ▸Per-product clocks: eligible again after a fixed period, often 12 to 36 months
- ▸Lifetime language: one bonus ever, spend it wisely
- ▸Closed-account windows: recent closures block or claw back the bonus
Early termination fees and the six-month heuristic
Many banks charge an early termination fee, commonly $25 to $50, if you close an account within a set window after opening, usually 90 to 180 days. Separately, some reserve the right to claw back the bonus itself on early closure. Both terms appear in the account agreement, not the bonus page, so check both documents.
The community heuristic is simple: keep every bonus account open for six months from opening. Six months clears nearly every fee window and clawback window in the market. The cost of holding a fee-waived account at minimum balance for a few extra months is close to zero. The cost of a clawback is the entire bonus.
If an account has a monthly fee you can no longer waive after the bonus posts, do the math instead of following the heuristic blindly. Sometimes paying one $12 fee beats waiting out a window. But when in doubt, six months and out.
Taxes: bonuses are income
Bank bonuses are not rebates and not rewards points. They are interest income. Expect a 1099-INT from every bank that paid you $10 or more, and report the income even when a bank fails to send the form. Brokerage account bonuses typically arrive on a 1099-MISC instead, as miscellaneous income, and the tax treatment is ordinary income either way.
This means your real yield is the bonus minus your marginal tax rate. A $300 bonus is roughly $225 after tax in the 24 percent bracket, with state tax on top where it applies. Factor that in when comparing a bonus against time spent.
Credit card signup bonuses, by contrast, are generally treated as purchase rebates and not taxed. The exception is a bonus earned without spending, like some card funding promotions or referral payments, which can generate a 1099. Keep every tax form the game produces in one folder and reconcile them in January.
Velocity and ChexSystems sensitivity
Every account you open creates a ChexSystems inquiry, and some banks read a crowded Chex file as risk. Chex-sensitive banks deny applicants with too many recent inquiries, with rough community thresholds like five or more in the last year. Other banks barely look. The sensitive list shifts over time, so check recent data points before applying to a bank you cannot afford to waste a clock on.
Velocity also matters inside each bank. Rapid open-fund-drain-close behavior at a single institution looks like fraud or money laundering to its monitoring systems, and the outcome can be account closure or, at the extreme, a bank ending its relationship with you entirely. That is a worse loss than any single bonus.
The sustainable pace for most people is a handful of new accounts per quarter, sequenced so that Chex-sensitive targets come first while your file is clean, and Chex-insensitive banks fill the gaps. Slow is smooth, and smooth keeps the game running for years.
- ▸Each opening adds a ChexSystems inquiry
- ▸Sensitive banks deny serial openers, often around 5+ inquiries per year
- ▸Hit Chex-sensitive banks early, while your file is quiet
- ▸Drain-and-close patterns at one bank invite closure
A suggested beginner sequence
Start local and large. Your state's big banks, the national names plus the strong regionals in your footprint, run the biggest and most reliable bonuses, and many regional offers are geofenced so you lose access if you move. Do those while you can.
Open one or two accounts at a time, not five. Your first cycle should teach you the full loop: open, fund, meet the direct deposit requirement, watch the bonus post, wait out the clawback window, close cleanly. Run that loop twice before you parallelize, because every mistake you will ever make appears in the first two cycles, when it is cheap.
Set up a hub account before anything else, keep the spreadsheet from day one, and read every offer's terms yourself rather than trusting a summary. After two or three clean cycles, you will have the pattern recognition to run several bonuses at once, and the meta-game becomes routine. New data points land in our forums daily. Use them.