Chase typically will not approve you for a new credit card if you’ve opened 5 or more new credit card accounts within the last 24 months. This rule is colloquially known as 5/24. If you’re applying for a Chase card and have opened more than a few cards recently, you’ll want to check your 5/24 status before applying.
Here’s how to do that.
Finding your 5/24 status manually with any credit report service
If you have access to your credit report, you can find your 5/24 status manually as long as the credit report that you’re using shows the account open date.
All you need to do is look at each of your credit card accounts and find what date you opened the account. Total up the number of accounts opened within the last two years to see if you are over 5/24.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Only credit card accounts count. So if you have a home loan, personal loan, auto loan or some other tradeline reporting to your credit report that isn’t a credit card, you can exclude that from your 5/24 count.
- Authorized user cards do count, but you can sometimes get Chase to reconsider a denial if it is your authorized user cards that pushed you to 5 or more accounts opened within the last 24 months.
- Even closed accounts count. Let’s say that you opened a new credit card 18 months ago, but then closed it 6 months ago when the annual fee came due because you decided that the card wasn’t providing enough value. That card would still count toward your 5/24 count, even though it is closed.
Of course, if you have a lot of credit cards and whichever service you’re using to look at your credit report requires you to click into each account, you might be interested in an easier way.
Methods of calculating your 5/24 status have come and gone in the past few years, but currently the easiest way to calculate your 5/24 status is with Credit Karma.
Calculating your 5/24 status with Credit Karma
As of posting, the easiest tool for checking your 5/24 status is Credit Karma. If you haven’t closed any accounts in the past two years, you can quickly count your recently opened accounts from a single page. But if you have closed accounts in the past two years, you’ll need to take the additional step of counting those accounts seperately.
Here’s how to do this.
Counting your open accounts
The first step in calculating your 5/24 number is to count your open accounts. Fortunately, using Credit Karma, you can see a list of open accounts, sorted by the date you opened your account. Here’s where to find this:
On the mobile app
- Click on the “For you” page at the bottom of the screen.
- Click on the “Credit” panel at the top of the screen.
- Scroll past your score, to the section labeled “Your Credit Factors”.
- Click on the box showing your “Credit age”.
On the website
- Click on the “Credit” menu at the top of the screen, or the “Credit” button at the bottom of the screen if you’re on the mobile website.
- Above the graph that shows your credit score over time, click on “Details”.
- Scroll past your score, to the section labeled “Credit Factors”.
- Click the line that says “Credit age”.
From here, you’ll see a list of all of the open accounts reporting to your credit report, sorted by open date, from oldest to youngest.
Scroll to the bottom of this list and count the number of accounts that show that they have been opened for two years or less.
Counting your closed accounts
If you’ve opened any accounts in the past two years, and then closed those accounts, those closed accounts also count toward your 5/24 status. and you must add them to your count if you want to get an accurate 5/24 count. Here’s where to find your closed accounts:
On the mobile app
- Click on the “For you” page at the bottom of the screen.
- Click on the “Credit” panel at the top of the screen.
- Scroll past your score, to the section labeled “Your Credit Factors”.
- Click on the box showing your “Total Accounts”.
On the website
- Click on the “Credit” menu at the top of the screen, or the “Credit” button at the bottom of the screen if you’re on the mobile website.
- Find the section on the page for “Accounts” and click on “Details”.
Now you will be at a page showing a list of all of your accounts on your credit report. Scroll to the bottom of this list and click on the link to show your closed accounts.
This list will show you all of the closed accounts on your credit report along with the date you closed the account. Now, it isn’t the date that you closed the account that matters for 5/24, but rather the date that you opened the account. And to see this, you need to click into the account details.
Of course, you don’t need to only need to look at accounts closed within the last two years. If you closed an account more than two years ago, you must have also opened it more than two years ago, and it won’t count toward 5/24.
Total up all of your closed accounts that were opened within the past 24 months and add those to your count of opened accounts you found earlier. This is the total number of accounts opened within the past 24 months.
If this number is 5 or more, Chase is unlikely to allow you open a new credit card account.
Ways of checking your 5/24 status that no longer work
It’s worth pointing out that some methods of checking your 5/24 status no longer work:
- Experian Mobile App. Experian has removed the ability to sort your credit accounts by date opened. You must now individually go into each account to see the opened date.
- Capital One CreditWise: Capital One’s view of your “New Accounts” now only shows you accounts that have been opened in the past 12 months.
I mentioned these in a previous revision of this article, but these methods have been dead for quite some time as of the last update.
What accounts count toward 5/24?
Any credit card account that is reporting to your personal credit report will count toward your 5/24 account count.
- Closed credit card accounts count. Even if you’ve closed an account, if you opened the account within the past 2 years, it will count toward your 5/24 status.
- Most business credit card accounts do not count. Many issuers do not report small business credit cards to your personal credit report. If they don’t show up on your personal credit report, they don’t count toward 5/24.
- Non credit-card accounts don’t count. All of the above methods of counting your 5/24 account status will show auto loans, mortgages, and other accounts on your credit report. Be sure to exclude these when tallying your 5/24 account count.
- Authorized user cards count… kind of. Cards on which you are an authorized user that report to your credit report count be default, but you can often get Chase to disregard these types of account if you speak to a representative for a reconsideration after being declined for a new account.
What is 5/24?
5/24 is a informal name for an unpublished rule that applies to applications for Chase credit cards. Chase will generally not approve you for a credit card if you’ve opened five or more credit cards within the past 24 months, though this appears to have softened in the last several months.
- If you are “over 5/24,” that means you’ve opened more than five accounts in the previous 24 months. You will usually be denied if you apply for a Chase credit card.
- If you are “under 5/24,” you won’t automatically be denied for a Chase credit card for having too many new accounts. But this doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be approved.
You can learn more about 5/24 in our overview of the 5/24 rule.
Why should you care about 5/24?
If you apply for Chase credit cards and open credit cards with some frequency, either to get a welcome bonus or to amass a collection of valuable benefits, you’ll want to be aware of your 5/24 status. Knowing if you’ll meet Chase’s 5/24 rule will help you make better decisions about applying for a credit card.
If you’re under 5/24 and have your eye on a few Chase credit cards, it’s probably best to prioritize your Chase applications and apply for other cards when you’re under 5/24.
If you’re over 5/24 and want a Chase credit card, it might be a good idea to prioritize business credit cards that don’t count toward your 5/24 status.
Bottom line: Using Credit Karma is the easiest way for most
To our knowledge, there aren’t any free tools that allow you directly see your 5/24 status from your credit report.
While, in theory you can count up the credit card accounts that you’ve opened during the last 24 months using a credit report from any source, currently Credit Karma is the free tool that makes this the easiest to do.
