The headline numbers
Premium travel cards got dramatically more expensive over the past year:
- Chase Sapphire Reserve: now $795/year, paired with an 8x rate on Chase Travel bookings and a deeper stack of partner credits
- Amex Platinum: now $895/year for renewals on or after January 2, 2026, with a refreshed credit lineup
- United Explorer: raised from $95 to $150/year
- Amex Gold: $325/year following its earlier increase
Issuers are betting that bigger credit bundles justify bigger fees. Sometimes they're right — but only for spending patterns that actually use those credits.
Sticker price vs. effective fee
The number that matters is the effective annual fee: sticker price minus the credits you would have spent money on anyway.
Take the Sapphire Reserve at $795. The $300 travel credit is nearly automatic for anyone who travels at all, bringing the practical cost to ~$495 before considering the other credits. If you'd genuinely use the dining and entertainment credits, the effective fee keeps falling. If you wouldn't, you're paying $795 for earn rates you can approximate with a $95 card.
That conditional — *would you have bought it anyway?* — is exactly where most people fool themselves. A $300 StubHub credit is worth $0 if you don't go to events.
How to decide
- List the credits you'd use at face value. Be honest: only count things you bought last year too.
- Subtract from the sticker fee. That's your effective fee.
- Compare the earn-rate gain against the next-best cheaper card. The Reserve's 3x dining only beats the Preferred's 3x dining by $0. The premium is in travel rates and credits.
Or skip the spreadsheet: the optimizer does this arithmetic across every card simultaneously, using conservative credit valuations you can customize. When a $795 card genuinely beats a $95 card for your spending, the solver will show the margin — and when it doesn't, it won't.
The bottom line
Fee increases aren't automatically bad news, but they reset the math for everyone. A setup that was optimal in 2024 may be leaving money on the table today. If you're holding a premium card out of habit, this is the year to re-run the numbers.