High Earners Are Finally Doing the Math on $700-a-Year Credit Cards

For years, premium annual fees looked like vanity purchases. Now, as travel rebounds and benefit stacks grow, the calculus is shifting.

The math used to be simple: a $695 annual fee is $695 you're not spending on anything else. But for a growing cohort of frequent travelers and high-income earners, the calculus has quietly flipped. Airline lounge access, hotel credits, and monthly lifestyle stipends have turned premium credit cards into something closer to a subscription bundle than a status symbol.

"We're seeing cardholders actually track their credits now," said one senior analyst at a major U.S. bank who declined to be named. "Five years ago, most people let them expire. Today, there's a whole ecosystem of people optimizing around them — and the card issuers know it."

The shift is partly behavioral, partly structural. Card issuers have layered on credits in categories — dining, streaming, fitness, rideshare — that higher earners already spend in, making the effective annual fee far lower than the sticker price for anyone paying attention. For heavy travelers, a single round-trip international flight in a lounge can represent $100 or more in saved lounge day passes.

Whether that represents genuine value or a sophisticated form of anchoring is a matter of some debate among financial planners. But the numbers don't lie: premium card adoption among households earning over $150,000 has grown 34% since 2022, according to industry data. The era of the aspirational metal card appears to be giving way to something more calculated.