People find my site searching for ways to monetize good credit, which is exactly how I found this business in the first place. I remember spending a surprising amount of time Googling “make money with good credit” before I stumbled onto a forum thread that mentioned selling authorized user tradelines. Once I understood the model, it made sense. You add someone as an authorized user on a card you already have, they get the benefit of your card’s history on their credit report for a couple of months, and you get paid for it. Nobody shares a physical card. If you’re wondering whether you can pay to be an authorized user on someone else’s account, the short answer is yes — and selling that slot is the other side of the same transaction.
What you’re actually selling
When you sell authorized user tradelines, you’re selling a temporary authorized user slot on one of your own credit cards. The card gets added to the buyer’s credit report — the same way it would if you added a spouse or a kid — and they get the reporting benefit: the card’s credit limit, its age, and its utilization show up on their report for the holding period — the broker standard is two billing cycles, roughly two months. (On my own store I keep the lines on a bit longer than that; more on why below.) They never receive a physical card, can’t make charges, and have zero access to your account. You’re renting out the history, not the card.
Two things drive what a tradeline is worth: limit and age. A $25,000 card opened years ago is worth far more than a $5,000 card opened recently, because it adds more available credit and more average account age to the buyer’s file. Issuers matter less than people assume. A seasoned Capital One card does the same thing on a buyer’s report as a seasoned Chase card — once the data hits the bureaus, the logo is irrelevant. (Buyers still ask for Chase by name, which used to drive me a little crazy until I stopped arguing with it.)
How the money works
There are two ways to sell, and the money is very different between them. Through a broker — Tradeline Supply Company, Boost Credit 101, Coast Tradelines, Improve My Credit Fitness — the broker handles the buyer side. They find the customer, validate the information, and send you the data you need to add the authorized user. In exchange, they take the larger share. The typical split is roughly 70% to the broker and 30% to you as the cardholder, so if a buyer pays $200 for a spot, you might net around $60.
Direct sales — like through my own store — skip the broker cut entirely, which changes the math considerably. The tradeoff is that you have to find buyers yourself and handle the logistics: collecting their information, adding them, confirming the post, and removing them when the term ends. It’s not complicated, but it’s more hands-on than just replying to broker emails. Either way, brokers want your cards “seasoned” — typically at least two years old — before they’ll list them. A card you opened last spring simply doesn’t have the age to be worth selling yet, so part of this business is just patiently letting good cards get older.
What the process actually looks like
Once a sale comes in, you get the buyer’s first name, last name, and sometimes a Social Security number. You log into your issuer’s website, add them as an authorized user, and wait for the next statement to close — that close is when the card posts to the bureau. Timing is the part people underestimate. Brokers usually send the data a day or two before your statement close date, which gives you a narrow window to add the user before that cycle cuts. Miss it and the sale rolls to the next cycle, which delays the buyer and creates headaches all around. If you’re curious about the exact lag buyers see, I broke it down separately in how long it takes for a tradeline to post.
After the agreed term — brokers typically run two billing cycles, about two months, and you can read more on how long tradelines stay on your credit — you remove the buyer. One thing I do differently on my own cards: I don’t pull the authorized user the second the term ends. Adding and deleting AUs in quick succession is exactly the pattern that gets an issuer’s fraud team looking at your account, so I let buyers sit on the card a little longer and stagger the removals. (It also means the buyer gets a bit more value, which never hurts the listing.) Removal itself is simple — you call the issuer or do it online, and the CFPB has a plain-English walkthrough of how to remove an authorized user if you’ve never done it. Issuer reliability varies, too. Capital One, Barclays, and US Bank post authorized users consistently. Citi is notorious for the opposite — it’s not rare to add someone and have the tradeline never show up. I’ve had buyers report that Citi slots just didn’t post, and there’s genuinely not much you can do when that happens except apologize and make it right.
The risks worth knowing upfront
The biggest risk is account closure. Bank of America in particular has a history of shutting down cards — and sometimes unrelated accounts with the same bank — when it detects tradeline-selling activity. I had a $40,000 BoA card closed on me at one point. (That one genuinely stung.) It was one of my better performers, and losing it wasn’t just lost income — closing a high-limit, well-aged card dinged my own credit profile too. BoA is widely considered the riskiest issuer for this, so if you’ve got a big BoA card you care about, think hard before you list it.
The other thing worth knowing is the Amex quirk. Since around 2015, American Express reports authorized users using the date the AU was added as the account open date — not the card’s original open date. So a 15-year-old Amex looks like a brand-new account on the buyer’s report, which kills the age benefit that makes a tradeline valuable in the first place. That’s why Amex tradelines get priced low or aren’t listed at all, no matter how prestigious the card feels in your wallet. And to be clear about one thing I won’t touch: none of this works with a CPN. Selling history to a synthetic identity number is fraud, full stop — real name, real Social, or nothing.
Is it actually worth it?
Honestly, the income is modest unless you scale across multiple cards and issuers. With a handful of cards listed through brokers plus some direct sales, it can bring in a few hundred dollars a month — passive in the sense that you’re barely working, but not enough to replace a real paycheck. Once it’s set up, I spend maybe an hour of actual work a month: adding users, confirming posts, removing people on schedule. What makes it worthwhile for me isn’t the headline number, it’s that the cards were just sitting there anyway. The history already existed; selling it is the rare case of getting paid for something you’d have owned regardless.
If you want to sell tradelines through my site, fill out the seller form here — I’ll review the cards, give you a realistic sense of what they’d list for, and walk you through it. And if you’re actually on the buyer side and landed here by accident, you can browse what’s available in the tradelines store instead.
Frequently asked questions
Adding an authorized user to your own credit card is a normal, legal feature every major issuer offers. Selling that slot sits in a gray area that the card networks discourage in their terms, which is why issuers like Bank of America sometimes close accounts over it. It becomes clearly illegal only when a CPN or synthetic identity is involved — that’s fraud, and I won’t do it.
Through a broker you typically keep about 30% of what the buyer pays, so a $200 sale nets you roughly $60. Selling directly removes the broker cut, so you keep far more per sale but have to find buyers and handle logistics yourself. Across a few seasoned cards, expect a few hundred dollars a month, not a full-time income.
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