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Chase has quietly updated the Guide to Benefits for the Chase Freedom Flex® credit card and buried in there is the news that the card’s cell phone protection is being withdrawn. Cardholders have until 19 September to incur a covered loss, and after that the benefit is gone.
[HT: Doctor of Credit]
For a card that charges no annual fee, cell phone protection has been one of the more useful benefits the Chase Freedom Flex® credit card offers. Losing it isn’t the end of the world, but it’s a devaluation, and it’s worth knowing about if this is the card you’ve been using to pay your phone bill.
The changes
Chase’s updated Guide to Benefits for the Flex card says this:
“Cell Phone Protection will cover eligible losses incurred through 09/19/26 and will be discontinued 09/20/26.”
Until then, the benefit works as before. To be eligible, you need to charge your entire monthly cellular service provider bill to the card for the billing cycle before the month in which an incident occurs. Coverage is then:
- Up to $800 per claim, after a $50 deductible
- A maximum of two paid claims in any 12-month period
- A maximum of $1,000 in any 12-month period
Coverage is supplemental, so if you have another policy that covers the phone, this benefit only pays what the other policy doesn’t.
Chase doesn’t appear to have announced this, it doesn’t appear to have emailed cardholders about it, and doesn’t appear to have replaced the benefit with anything else, so we just have the unannounced update to the Guide to Benefits.
Quick thoughts
Firstly, this gives cardholders roughly ten weeks. If you’ve got a cracked screen you’ve been meaning to deal with, or a phone that’s already been damaged, the claim window closes on 19 September, so you need to get going with a claim sooner rather than later.
Secondly, it’s interesting to note that Chase doesn’t appear to be removing cell phone cover from other cards that offer this. The Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card and the Ink Business Premier® Credit Card both appear to still offer it (there hasn’t been an update tho theor Guide to Benefits as far as we can tell), and both offer a better version of the cover than Flex does/did (up to $1,000 per claim and up to three claims a year, against the Flex’s $800 and two).
That suggests that the Flex card wasn’t returning enough to make it worthwhile for Chase to keep this, presumably expensive, benefit in place. Given that the Flex card doesn’t charge an annual fee, I guess we could say that we were lucky to see this card offer this benefit at all.
Finally, it would be remiss of us not to point out that, unfortunately, this isn’t the only of this card’s benefits that Chase has removed or devalued in the recent past. The card has already lost ShopRunner and its Boxed rewards (which may or may not have been useful to cardholders), and the Lyft earning rate was cut from 5x to 2x, so we’re starting to see an unwelcome pattern here. Let’s hope this is where it ends.
Bottom line
Cell phone protection on the Chase Freedom Flex® credit card covers eligible losses through 19 September 2026, but will be discontinued on 20 September 2026.
If you’ve been paying your phone bill with the Flex specifically for the insurance, you’re going to have to make new plans from 20 September onwards. A no annual fee option would be the Wells Fargo Autograph® Card or, if you’d prefer a higher level of cover, the $95/year Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card may work for you.
