Chase Sapphire Preferred's 2026 Refresh: Is the New 100K Bonus Worth It?

Chase relaunched the Sapphire Preferred on June 15, 2026, and for once a "refresh" didn't mean a fee hike buried under a pile of perks nobody uses. The annual fee holds at $95, the welcome bonus jumped to 100,000 points, and the card picked up real earning categories. It also lost something churners actually cared about. Here's whether the new version clears the bar for a 5/24 slot.

What's actually new

The headline number is the welcome offer: 100,000 points after $5,000 in spend in the first three months. That's only the third time in the card's 17-year history the Sapphire Preferred has offered six figures, and The Points Guy pegs it at roughly $2,050 in value using Chase's transfer partners at their June 2026 valuations. If you're the type who tracks bonus categories the way other people track fantasy football stats, this is the best the card has looked in years.

The recurring perks also got better, not just the sign-up bait:

The Chase Travel hotel credit doubled from $50 to $100 per account anniversary. That alone gets you most of the way to offsetting the $95 fee before a single point hits your account. The Global Entry/TSA PreCheck/NEXUS credit is now up to $120 and runs on a four-year cycle instead of the old cadence. Chase also added emergency evacuation and transportation coverage to the travel protections, and cardholders activating by December 31, 2026 get a year of Apple TV+ thrown in.

On the earning side, Chase added 3x points on gas and EV charging and 3x on vacation rentals (Airbnb, Vrbo, and similar), stacking on top of the existing 3x on dining and other travel. That's a meaningfully wider everyday-spend footprint than the card had before.

What you lose

Two changes matter if you're optimizing rather than just holding the card.

The 10% anniversary points bonus is gone for anyone who applies on or after June 15, 2026. That perk used to hand you bonus points equal to 10% of your prior year's spend, so a $50,000 spend year meant a free 5,000 points on your cardmember anniversary. New applicants don't get it at all.

The bigger hit for points nerds: Ultimate Rewards points transferring to World of Hyatt drop from a 1:1 ratio to 4:3 starting October 1, 2026. That's a 25% haircut on the transfer that's historically delivered some of the best redemption value in the entire Chase ecosystem. If you've never transferred to Hyatt, this changes nothing for you. If Hyatt redemptions were your endgame for Ultimate Rewards points, it's worth recalculating whether the card's value proposition still holds.

Does it clear the bar for churners

For most churners, yes, and it's not close. A $100 hotel credit against a $95 fee already makes the card cash-flow positive before you factor in a 100K bonus worth roughly 20x the annual fee. The new 3x categories also make it a reasonable keeper card rather than a pure sign-up-and-downgrade play, which matters if you're trying to stay under Chase's 5/24 threshold without burning a slot on a card you'll product-change away from in a year anyway.

The calculus changes if Hyatt transfers were central to your redemption strategy. A 4:3 ratio doesn't wreck the card, but it does mean re-running the math on whether you're better off routing points toward Hyatt now (before the October 1 change), a different transfer partner, or straight through the Chase Travel portal where the hotel credit already does some of the work for you.

Worth flagging for anyone newer to this: the 5/24 rule is still the gate you have to clear before Chase approves this application at all, and the eligibility math hasn't changed just because the card refreshed.

Whichever way you land on this one, the annoying part of churning isn't the math, it's remembering the $5,000 minimum spend deadline three months from now, or noticing before October 1 that your Hyatt transfer window is closing. That's the part BonusTrail is built for: log the account, set the spend deadline, and get a heads-up before anything expires instead of finding out after the fact.