A broker emailed me a rate sheet once and I nearly moved a card over it. Their number was $275 a spot. The broker I was already with paid $250 for the same card. Twenty-five dollars is twenty-five dollars, so I started filling out the paperwork before I bothered to read the rest of the page — and then I saw the cycle length. That is the thing nobody puts in bold: tradeline payouts are quoted per authorized user spot, but the spot doesn’t last the same length of time at every broker. Once I divided by the months, the $275 offer was worth barely half of what I was already getting.
So this post is about the arithmetic I wish someone had handed me at the start. Not which broker is nicest to deal with — what a card actually earns, per month, and which of the things you can change about your card are worth money.
If you’d rather skip the reading and just run your own card, I built a calculator that does this math against every broker’s published schedule at once: compare what each broker pays for your card.
What do tradeline payouts actually work out to per month?
Per spot is the wrong unit. A cycle is the number of statement periods a buyer stays on your card, and it varies by broker and by issuer within the same broker. Tradeline Supply Company runs everything on two months. Boost Credit 101 runs Chase on four, Capital One, PNC and Navy Federal on three, and Discover, Barclays, US Bank, Elan, TD Bank and Citi on two. TradelineScore splits it differently again — Chase and Bank of America on three, everyone else on two. Same card, three different denominators.
Take a six-and-a-half-year-old Chase card with a $35,000 limit. TSC’s schedule pays $250 a spot on a two-month cycle — $125 a month. Boost Credit 101 pays $275 a spot on a four-month cycle — $68.75 a month. The bigger advertised number earns you 45% less. Your card is tied up twice as long for it, and that’s twice as long you can’t sell that slot to anyone else.
I ran every combination I could price on both published schedules. TSC came out ahead per month in all of them, including the ones where the per-spot figure said otherwise. A $25,000 Barclays at six years: $200 a spot on two months at TSC versus $175 on two months at Boost — same direction, smaller gap. A $35,000 Capital One: $125 a month versus $83.33.
When does seasoning a card stop paying you anything?
Everyone tells sellers to season their cards. It’s good advice right up until it isn’t, and where it stops being true depends entirely on which schedule you’re on.
TradelineScore’s schedule breaks on age exactly twice: at two years and at ten. Between those two points, nothing happens. A three-year-old card and a nine-year-old card with the same limit pay identically. And the ten-year step only exists in the top bracket — above $40,001. So if you’re holding a $25,000 card on that schedule, its age is worth exactly zero dollars to you from the day it turns two, forever. Waiting doesn’t help. Nothing you do with time changes that number.
TSC’s grid is the opposite: it steps at 12 months, two years, five years, ten years and twenty. On a $20,000–$30,000 card that’s $50 a spot at 12 months climbing to $300 at twenty years. There, patience genuinely pays. Below twelve months, though, TSC buys nothing at any limit — a brand new card with a $70,000 line is worth zero to them.
What is a credit limit increase actually worth in dollars?
This is the most useful thing on this page, and it’s the one sellers ask about least. Payouts are step functions, not slopes. Buyers pay roughly in proportion to the limit; sellers get paid in brackets. So a $35,000 card and a $39,999 card earn you the same money, and the entire value of a limit increase depends on whether it carries you over a bracket line.
Here’s TSC’s ladder for a card in the five-to-nine-year band, per spot on a two-month cycle:
- $10,000–$14,999 — $125 a spot, $62.50 a month
- $15,000–$19,999 — $150 a spot, $75.00 a month
- $20,000–$29,999 — $200 a spot, $100.00 a month
- $30,000–$39,999 — $250 a spot, $125.00 a month
- $40,000–$55,999 — $300 a spot, $150.00 a month
- $56,000–$65,999 — $350 a spot, $175.00 a month
Read that as a shopping list. If your card sits at $35,000, asking for $5,000 more is worth $50 a spot — $25 a month, $300 a year with the slot kept full. If it sits at $28,000, the same $5,000 increase is worth nothing at all, because you land at $33,000 and you were already being paid the $30,000 rate. Check where you are before you call. (I have made the pointless version of that call more than once.)
How much of what the buyer pays does the cardholder keep?
Across TSC’s live inventory, the median listing is priced around $780 and the median commission behind those listings is $200. The cardholder keeps roughly a quarter. If you’ve only ever seen the seller side, that number stings the first time you see it next to the retail price on the same card.
The honest counter-argument is that the broker is doing real work for the other three quarters. They carry the marketing that produces the buyer, they verify the buyer isn’t running synthetic identity fraud, they handle disputes when a posting is late or doesn’t show, and they eat the refunds when an issuer simply never reports the authorized user. Citi is notorious for exactly that. I’ve had postings go missing. Somebody absorbs that cost and it isn’t me.
What the split does tell you is that the broker’s cut is fixed and your side isn’t. You can’t negotiate the percentage. You can move a card to a shorter cycle, push a limit over a bracket line, and stop waiting on age that isn’t going to be paid for — and those three things are entirely inside your control.
The stuff that costs you money in ways the schedule doesn’t show
Two things sit outside the payout grid and both are worth more than a bracket.
The first is issuer risk. Bank of America closed a $40,000 card of mine over tradeline activity, and closing a card doesn’t just end that income — it takes the age with it. There is no bracket on any schedule that compensates for losing a decade of history. American Express is a different kind of trap: since 2015 Amex reports an authorized user with the date the user was added, not the card’s real open date, so a twenty-year-old Amex shows up on the buyer’s report as days old. Brokers price it accordingly and no amount of seasoning fixes it.
The second is availability. Boost Credit 101 only takes six issuers at all — Barclays, Discover, PNC, US Bank, Elan and Chase — and three of those six are marked inventory-full for the year, so in practice a new cardholder is looking at Barclays, Discover or PNC and nothing else. They also cap you: seven Discover spots a year, five at PNC and only one spot on the card at a time. Rates move and enrollment opens and closes, so a rate sheet you saved six months ago is decoration (mine was, which is how I ended up building a page that reads the schedules instead of remembering them). When you’re ready to actually place a card, the mechanics of who you notify and when are covered in how selling a credit card as a tradeline actually works, and the CFPB has the plain-English version of how to remove an authorized user when a cycle ends — which you will be doing every couple of months, forever.
If you want the buyer’s half of this picture, I keep a live index of what tradelines are actually selling for — pulled from broker inventory rather than from anyone’s marketing page. Comparing the two sides is uncomfortable and also the fastest way to understand what you’re really being paid for. And if you just want the number for your own card, the payout calculator ranks every broker that takes your issuer by what they pay per month, not per spot. It also tells you what the next limit bracket would be worth, which is the question I get asked most and the one the FAQ couldn’t answer until I built it.
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