The 2-card setup that covers
80% of contractor spend

Why two cards and not six

Every points article you'll read is written by someone who flies 40 times a year and has eleven cards. That's a hobby. What you have is a business with predictable spending and no time to think about which card to pull out at the counter.

So the goal here isn't maximum points. It's maximum points per unit of hassle — which in practice means: cover your two or three biggest recurring expenses at an elevated rate, put everything else on one catch-all, and stop.

Where contractor money actually goes

Look at a year of your business statements and the same categories come up in almost every case:

• Materials — lumber yards, supply houses, big-box stores. Usually the largest line, and usually the worst for bonus categories, because building supply merchants almost never code as anything special.
• Fuel — trucks, generators, equipment. Steady, predictable, and coded reliably at gas stations.
• Subcontractors — often paid by check or ACH, which earns nothing. Worth asking which of your subs take cards without a surcharge.
• Insurance, phone, internet — boring, recurring, and quietly one of the best category matches available.
• Advertising — Google, Facebook, the local paper, truck wraps, yard signs. Growing every year for most people I talk to.

The pairing

The Ink Business Cash handles your recurring overhead. Its 5x category — office supply stores plus internet, cable and phone service — is far more useful to a contractor than it sounds, because office supply stores sell gift cards. A gift card bought at 5x and spent at a supply house effectively earns 5x on materials that would otherwise earn 1x. Check your own supplier's gift card availability before you count on it, and don't buy more than you'll actually use.

The Ink Business Preferred handles travel, shipping and advertising at 3x, and does the job the Ink Cash can't: it transfers points to airlines. Points earned on the Ink Cash are cash back until they're combined into an account that can transfer. That step is free, takes about four minutes, and is the one people miss.

What this is actually worth in a year

Run your own numbers rather than trusting mine, but here's the shape of it for a one-truck residential operation with, say, $180,000 of annual business spend:

Illustrative only — the split between categories varies enormously by trade and by how much of your material cost runs through a card at all. Category caps apply to the elevated rates; check the current terms before you plan around them.

At a realistic 1.8–2 cents per point transferred to a partner, 170,000 points is somewhere around $3,000–$3,400 of travel. Add a welcome bonus on either card and the first year is considerably more. That's a family trip funded by money you were spending anyway.

The four-minute step everybody skips

Points earned on the Ink Cash sit in that card's account and default to being worth 1 cent as cash. To get the real value:

What to do about materials

This is the honest weak point. Building supply houses rarely code into a bonus category, and many surcharge for cards. Three things worth checking:

• Which suppliers take cards without a fee. Some absorb it on account customers. Ask — it's a two-minute phone call that can be worth thousands of points a year.
• Whether a 3% surcharge is ever worth paying. Generally no. You're paying $3 to earn about $1.20 of value. Pay those by check.
• Gift cards from office supply stores. Legitimate, and the single biggest lever available to a contractor on the Ink Cash. Buy only what you'll actually spend.

When to add a third card

Two cards is the right answer until one of these is true: you're consistently hitting the Ink Cash's 5x annual cap, you've got significant spend in a category neither card covers, or you want a personal card in the mix for household spending. Even then, the answer is usually one more card — the Ink Unlimited at 1.5x on everything with no annual fee — rather than three.

The full program picture is in the Chase Ultimate Rewards guide, including which cards can transfer and the 5/24 rule that decides what order to apply in.

Common questions