The credit card rewards ecosystem most American households now treat as ordinary, the welcome bonuses, transfer partners, lounge access, and 3x and 5x category multipliers, exists because of a specific revenue mechanic that a federal bill keeps trying to dismantle. The Credit Card Competition Act, sponsored by Senators Dick Durbin and Roger Marshall, would impose payment-network routing requirements on credit cards similar to those imposed on debit cards by the 2010 Durbin Amendment. As of mid-2026 the bill had not passed, but it has been reintroduced, attached to other legislation, and dropped from those packages multiple times, and its sponsors continue to look for a vehicle.
For points-and-miles users the stakes are direct and quantifiable. Interchange fees fund rewards. If interchange revenue falls sharply, welcome bonuses, category multipliers, lounge access, and transfer-partner relationships are the obvious places banks will cut. The 2010 debit-card precedent gives a usable read on what happens after this kind of cap, and the picture there is not flattering for the consumer-savings argument the bill's sponsors continue to make.
The takeaway up front: the legislation has been quiet through the first half of 2026 but is not dead, and the cost of being unprepared is high enough that it's worth understanding the threat now.
What the Credit Card Competition Act actually does
The CCCA would require large credit card issuers, banks with more than $100 billion in assets, to enable at least one payment network on each credit card that is not Visa or Mastercard. The intent, per the bill's sponsors, is to break what they describe as a Visa-Mastercard duopoly on credit card routing and to let merchants pick the cheapest network on each transaction. The structure mirrors the 2010 Durbin Amendment, which imposed similar two-network requirements and a price cap on debit interchange.
The routing requirement is the structural change. Merchants would direct transactions to the lowest-cost network, which means card issuers would compete on price to be the routed-to choice. The expected result is downward pressure on interchange fees, which is precisely the outcome the bill's sponsors describe as a win for merchants and consumers.
The bill does not explicitly cap credit card interchange the way the Durbin Amendment capped debit interchange. The cap effect comes indirectly, through routing competition, which makes the long-run revenue impact on issuers harder to forecast cleanly. Most independent analyses assume issuer interchange revenue falls meaningfully under this kind of regime, with estimates ranging from modest single-digit reductions to losses well above 20 percent on covered transactions.
Why credit card rewards are at risk
Interchange fees are how credit card rewards get paid for. A typical Visa or Mastercard credit transaction generates interchange of roughly 1.5 to 3 percent of the purchase amount, paid by the merchant's acquirer to the card-issuing bank. Premium cards sit at the high end of that range, basic cards at the low end. The issuer keeps most of that interchange, uses a portion to cover fraud and operating costs, and routes the rest into the rewards budget that funds welcome bonuses, points-earning multipliers, and benefits like lounge access and travel credits.
Rewards are not a marketing line item issuers can pad without consequence. They are a precise economic feature of the interchange-funded model. The 100,000-point welcome bonus on a premium card has an expected redemption cost the issuer projects against expected interchange revenue from that cardholder over a multi-year window. Cut the interchange revenue line and the rewards-budget line has to come down with it.
Oxford Economics published an analysis of the Durbin-Marshall bill estimating that the economic cost of forced routing on credit cards could reach $228 billion and 156,000 jobs nationally, with a meaningful portion of that impact concentrated in travel and tourism. That figure is contested by the bill's supporters, but the directional logic, that reducing rewards reduces travel-related spending, is straightforward.
The 2010 Durbin Amendment, and what actually happened
The cleanest read on what the CCCA would do to credit card rewards is the experience under the 2010 Durbin Amendment, which capped debit card interchange for large banks. The bill's supporters made the same arguments in 2010 that CCCA supporters make today: merchants would save on fees, those savings would be passed to consumers as lower prices, and banks would absorb the difference. Independent reviews of the post-Durbin period are unanimous that the prediction did not hold.
A 2017 Federal Reserve research paper found that banks subject to the Durbin debit cap were 35.2 percent less likely to offer free checking accounts, raised monthly checking fees by roughly 17 to 20 percent on average, and increased minimum-balance requirements by at least 50 percent. The lost interchange revenue did not disappear; it was recovered through higher account fees on the same customers who had been told the cap would benefit them. A 2022 Government Accountability Office review concluded that, absent the Durbin Amendment, roughly 65 percent of noninterest checking accounts at covered banks would have been free, compared with the lower share that prevails today.
The consumer price story is even less encouraging. A 2015 Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond survey found that more than 21 percent of merchants raised prices after the rule went into effect, and 98 percent of merchants either raised prices or kept them flat. Multiple subsequent reviews concluded that the price effect on consumers was negligible to nonexistent. The merchants kept the savings; the price reductions promised on the floor of the Senate did not materialize.
Debit card rewards programs disappeared almost entirely in the same window. The handful of survivors are vestigial, structured around very narrow use cases, and not comparable to the pre-2010 environment when debit cash-back programs were widely advertised. Anyone who earned meaningful debit rewards before 2010 already lived through the experiment the CCCA proposes to run on the credit card side.
Recent legislative attempts and current status
The CCCA has been introduced in multiple congressional sessions and has not passed as standalone legislation. Standalone passage requires sixty Senate votes and the bill has consistently fallen short. The sponsors' fallback is to attach the routing requirement as an amendment to a vehicle bill that is itself likely to pass, and the 2025 cycle produced a high-profile attempt of this kind.
Supporters tried to attach the CCCA to the GENIUS Act, a cryptocurrency-related bill moving through the Senate in 2025. The amendment was dropped from the final Senate package. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina publicly warned that he would withdraw support for the GENIUS Act on the floor if the CCCA stayed attached, and several other senators raised similar objections. The vehicle moved forward without the routing language, but the sponsors continued looking for attachment opportunities.
As of mid-2026 the bill had not passed, and there is no scheduled standalone vote. The continued risk is attachment to a must-pass piece of legislation, an appropriations bill, a defense authorization, a debt-ceiling package, where individual senators face higher political costs for blocking the underlying bill over a single amendment.
Impact on points and miles if the bill passes
The downstream impact on the rewards stack is best understood line by line, because each piece of the current ecosystem has different exposure to the interchange-revenue change.
Welcome bonuses are the most exposed. The 60,000 to 100,000-point sign-up offers on cards like the Chase Sapphire Preferred, Chase Sapphire Reserve, and Capital One Venture X are funded directly out of expected interchange over the cardholder's first several years. A meaningful interchange cut would force issuers to shrink those bonuses or remove them where the math no longer supports the payout. Debit rewards disappeared almost entirely under Durbin; the equivalent move on the credit side would be reduction rather than elimination, but the trajectory is the same.
Earning rates would compress. Category multipliers like 3x dining, 4x groceries, and 5x travel exist because the interchange on those categories is high enough to fund them at premium rates. If interchange falls, the simplest issuer response is to cut multipliers back toward 1x to 1.5x across the board, with category bonuses reserved for top-spending segments rather than offered broadly.
Premium benefits are the next layer down. Travel credits, lounge access, hotel-status grants, elite-night credits, and Priority Pass memberships are all funded out of the same interchange budget that funds points earning. Annual fees on premium cards cover a portion of these benefits but not most of them. Reduced interchange means premium benefits get scaled back, restricted, or moved behind higher annual fees.
Transfer-partner relationships are the piece most points-aware travelers care about. The 1:1 transfer ratios from Chase Ultimate Rewards to airlines like United and Southwest, from American Express Membership Rewards to Delta and ANA, and from Capital One to Air France and Turkish are commercial agreements that issuers fund out of their rewards budgets. If the budgets shrink, transfer ratios get worse, partner lists get shorter, and the high-cpp redemptions that make flexible currencies valuable become rarer. The dedicated guides to Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners and American Express transfer partners describe how these partnerships are structured, and the same structures would come under pressure first.
Who actually benefits from this bill
The bill's sponsors describe the CCCA as a consumer-protection measure that breaks up an anticompetitive duopoly. The independent analyses, including the Oxford Economics work and the Federal Reserve reviews of the parallel debit-card regime, point in a different direction. The primary beneficiaries of forced routing are large retailers with enough volume and bargaining power to extract the best routing arrangements. The Electronic Payments Coalition has characterized the bill as a transfer from the rewards-funded consumer economy to the largest corporate merchants, principally Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Home Depot.
Community banks, nominally exempt from the Durbin Amendment, saw a 30 percent decline in their debit interchange revenue in the years after the rule took effect, because the market repriced interchange across the board. The same pattern would likely apply on the credit side: the exemption protects covered institutions on paper, but the market does not respect the line, and smaller issuers lose revenue along with the large ones.
Small businesses face a separate problem. The largest retailers can negotiate routing arrangements that capture most of the savings. A small business taking credit card payments through a standard processor sees minimal benefit because the processor sits between the merchant and the network and captures most of the difference.
Fraud and security concerns
A Texas A&M University study estimated that the CCCA could roughly double the volume of credit card fraud over the next decade, based on 2021 transaction data. The mechanism is that the alternative networks the bill would force banks to enable do not have the same fraud-detection infrastructure as Visa and Mastercard, both of which have spent decades and billions of dollars building real-time scoring, tokenization, and dispute-resolution systems.
Fraud losses are also paid out of interchange. If fraud doubles while interchange falls, the rewards budget faces compression from both sides, the revenue line shrinking and the cost line growing. That is a stronger version of the same pressure that pulled debit rewards out of the market after 2010.
What to do
The practical response for a points-and-miles user has two parts: voice and positioning.
On the voice side, the political resistance to past CCCA pushes has come largely from senators who heard from constituents about the consumer impact. Contacting senators and representatives, particularly those on the relevant committees, is one of the actions that has visibly moved this bill in past cycles. The Electronic Payments Coalition runs a constituent-contact tool, and several issuer websites, including Chase's and American Express's, host similar pages.
On the positioning side, the realistic move is to maximize the current rewards opportunity while the structure still exists. That means earning welcome bonuses on cards where the bonus is still well above the historical average, transferring flexible currencies to partner programs where the ratios are still favorable, and burning points on high-cpp redemptions, premium-cabin international, top-tier Hyatt sweet spots, peak-date partner awards, when the math justifies it. The deeper writeup on the best travel credit cards lays out the current shortlist for new account openings, and dedicated guides to Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners and American Express transfer partners cover the redemption side.
A few specific behaviors worth considering. First, treat large flexible-points balances as inventory worth using rather than worth hoarding; the downside risk to a hoarded balance under a CCCA-style devaluation is meaningful, and the downside risk to a redeemed balance is zero. Second, prioritize transfer redemptions over portal redemptions on premium cards while transfer ratios are still 1:1, because the transfer-partner side is most likely to be cut first. Third, lock in welcome bonuses on cards worth holding for the next few years, because current bonus levels are the high-water mark and would not survive a meaningful interchange cut.
The bottom line
The Credit Card Competition Act is the most serious legislative threat the credit card rewards ecosystem has faced in over a decade. The mechanics are clean enough to forecast: forced routing reduces interchange, reduced interchange shrinks the rewards budget, and the rewards budget is what funds every welcome bonus, multiplier, transfer partner, and lounge membership a points enthusiast relies on. The 2010 Durbin Amendment ran the experiment on the debit side, and the result was a one-way transfer from consumers to large merchants, with bank fees rising to recover the lost revenue from the same customers who were told they would benefit.
The bill has not passed and faces real opposition, but it has been quiet in 2026 rather than dead, and the attachment strategy its sponsors continue to favor means the timing of any future passage is unpredictable. The right posture for a points-and-miles user is to assume the structure that exists today is the one to use today, and to maximize the value being extracted from it while the rules still permit. The points ecosystem has provided significant value to American households for a long time; whether it survives the next session in its current form is, at least partly, a function of how loudly the people who use it speak up.
This article contains affiliate links. If you apply through our links, we may earn a commission at no cost to you, which helps us continue sharing points and miles strategies with the community.
Some of the links in this article are affiliate links. We may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you if you apply through these links. This helps us keep the site running and continue creating free content.
