Nothing says “vacation” better than lay flat seats on a transcontinental flight. Not much will clean out your bank account quicker. Pay your mortgage, earn points, fly somewhere. For a payment that size it seems like it should be the easiest travel money anyone ever made. A couple thousand dollars a month running through a rewards program should add up to a real number by December.
The reality is this “travel hack” is harder to pull off than it looks. We do what we can to accumulate points and miles but do not participate in what follows.
Quick note before we go further. We are licensed Oregon Principal Brokers, not financial advisors, and we have no affiliation with and take no compensation from any card issuer, airline, or rewards company named here. This is arithmetic, not advice.
As of August 2026, Bilt lets you pay a mortgage and earn points, but it is an ACH draft from your bank account, not a credit card charge. On a $3,000 monthly payment, a full year of points is worth roughly $250 to $990, depending almost entirely on how you redeem them.
If it is not a credit card charge, what is it?
An ACH draft, which is how most people already pay the mortgage, with a rewards program sitting on top of it.
Bilt, which began as a rent rewards program and expanded into mortgages, pulls the money directly out of your linked checking account and pays the servicer itself. No card network touches the transaction. That is why there is no 2.9% processing fee and why your servicer has no objection to any of it. It is also why the payment never hits your credit line or your utilization. What you are doing is routing an ordinary bank draft through a rewards company that pays you for the privilege of knowing about it, which is a less exciting sentence than the ads use but a more accurate one.
What does a year of mortgage payments actually earn?
Somewhere between $247 and $990 on a $3,000 payment, and that spread is the entire story.
Let’s look at a $3,000 a month payment. Bilt’s top rate on housing is 1.25 points per dollar, so twelve months of that, $36,000 in all, generates 45,000 points. Transfer them to an airline partner and redeem well and you are looking at about $990, which works out to a 2.75% return on $36,000 of mortgage payments. Redeem them as a statement credit instead, which is what most people actually do once the novelty wears off, and those same 45,000 points are worth roughly $247, or 0.69%.
Same points, same year, a fourfold difference in outcome, decided by whether you are the sort of person who enjoys researching award availability on a Tuesday night. Some people are. Most people who tell themselves they will be are not.
What is the catch on the spending requirement?
You have to spend your mortgage all over again to earn the advertised rate.
That top rate is not automatic. Bilt sets your housing multiplier by how much you put on the card everywhere else that month, on a sliding scale: spend 25% of your mortgage amount and you earn 0.5x, 50% earns 0.75x, 75% earns 1x, and only matching or beating your full mortgage payment gets you to 1.25x. On a $3,000 mortgage that means running $3,000 a month, $36,000 a year, of groceries and gas and restaurants and everything else through that one card.
Which reframes the whole question, because the mortgage was never really the asset in play. Your ordinary spending is, and the moment you commit it to Bilt you have given up whatever some other card would have paid you for the same purchases.
How does that compare to an airline card?
It depends on what you want the points for, which sounds like a dodge and is not.
Alaska’s Atmos Rewards cards are the obvious comparison as our PNW airline. There are two Bank of America cards, the Ascent at $95 a year and the Summit at $395. As of July 2026 the Ascent offers 70,000 points plus a $99 companion fare after $2,500 of spending in 90 days, and the Summit offers 80,000 points plus a 25,000-point Global Companion Award after $4,000 in 90 days. That companion fare can be worth hundreds of dollars.
Neither one earns a flat rate, which matters. The Summit pays 3x on dining, on Alaska and Hawaiian purchases, and on foreign transactions, and 1x on everything else. The Ascent pays 3x on Alaska and Hawaiian, 2x on gas, transit, rideshare and streaming, and 1x elsewhere. Bilt pays a flat 1x on everything that is not housing. So take the same $36,000 of annual spending, assume $4,800 of it is restaurants and $3,600 is gas and transit, and put the same $3,000 mortgage behind all three:
| Year one | Bilt Blue | Atmos Ascent | Atmos Summit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual fee | $0 | $95 | $395 |
| Points from everyday spend | 36,000 | 39,600 | 45,600 |
| Points from the mortgage | 45,000 | 0 | 0 |
| Welcome bonus | $100 credit | 70,000 pts | 80,000 pts |
| Total points | 81,000 | 109,600 | 125,600 |
| Value, net of annual fee | $1,882 | $1,604 | $1,552 |
| Companion benefit | None | $99 companion fare | 25,000-point companion award |
| Other perks | None | Free checked bag, priority boarding | Free checked bag for you plus six, 8 lounge passes, Global Entry credit |
Point values there are The Points Guy’s August 2026 figures, 2.2 cents for Bilt and 1.55 cents for Atmos. The companion benefits sit outside those totals, because neither one is points.
Two things stand out. Bilt produces the most value on paper, and it does that on the strength of a single assumption: 2.2 cents a point, which you only get by transferring to an airline partner and redeeming well. Alaska’s welcome bonus, meanwhile, is worth more all by itself than the entire year of mortgage points Bilt generates. One card is paying you for a bill you already had. The other is paying you for filling out an application.
There is also status, which Bilt does not compete for at all. The Summit earns a status point for every $2 spent and drops another 10,000 in your lap each anniversary, so $36,000 of spending lands you near 28,000 status points, past Alaska’s 20,000 threshold for Silver. The Ascent earns one per $3, so the same spending gets you 12,000 and no tier. Bilt earns none, because it is not an airline program and does not pretend to be. Whether any of that matters depends on whether you fly Alaska enough to care about upgrades and boarding groups.
Would a plain cash back card beat all of this?
For a lot of households, yes, and it deserves saying out loud.
A flat 2% cash back card on the same $36,000 pays $720. No annual fee, no transfer partners, no award calendars, no anniversary math, nothing to remember. Bilt’s 81,000 points only beat that if you extract real value from them. Redeem them the ordinary way, as a statement credit at roughly half a cent, and the year comes to about $546. The boring card wins, and it wins while you ignore it completely.
That is the honest frame for all of this. Airline points have narrower uses than cash and are worth more only when you spend them in the narrow way they reward you for. Cash is worth exactly what it says, on every purchase you will ever make, forever.
So which one actually wins?
Whichever one matches what you want, and the three answers are genuinely different.
If you want the most points and you like the redemption game, Bilt wins, and it wins by more in year two once the airline welcome bonuses are spent. A welcome bonus happens once. In year two Bilt is still producing 81,000 points at no annual fee, while the Summit is down to the 45,600 its everyday categories earn, against a $395 bill that arrives whether you fly or not. The Summit does hand you another 25,000-point Global Companion Award at each anniversary, but that is a discount on a second seat on an award booking rather than points you can spend, so it only pays if you are actually flying Alaska with someone.
If you want certainty, take the airline bonus in year one. A companion fare is a concrete thing you can picture using. So is a lounge chair, a checked bag, and Silver status.
And if you want none of the work, take the cash back card and stop reading articles like this one.
So is it worth doing?
For most households, no, and the reason has nothing to do with the points being fake.
It is that the effort-to-payoff ratio is poor and the entire thing collapses the moment you carry a balance. One month of revolving at north of 20% erases a year of mortgage points and then some, so if there is any real chance you do not pay in full every month, this is not a strategy. For a household that already runs everything through one card, clears it monthly, and enjoys the redemption side of it, the money is real. Call it eight hundred to a couple thousand dollars a year, which is a genuine trip and not nothing.
One footnote for anyone reading this from a rental. The math is friendlier to you than it is to owners, because the spending hurdle scales with the size of your housing payment and rent is usually the smaller number. A renter at $1,800 has a far easier time hitting the top tier than an owner at $3,500 does, which is a rare case of the arrangement favoring the person with less. Worth knowing, though it belongs well down the list next to the checklist we hand first-time buyers and the things that actually cost first-time buyers money, which move a lot more than a few hundred dollars of airfare.
Buy the house first. Optimize the points after.
Questions about what any of this means for your situation? We’re happy to walk through it.
Card terms, welcome offers, earn rates, and point valuations are current as of August 2026 and change without notice; welcome offers in particular move frequently. Point values are estimates from The Points Guy’s August 2026 valuations and are not guaranteed redemption rates. Category spending assumptions are illustrative and your own mix will differ. This article is general information from licensed Oregon Principal Brokers — not financial, tax, or lending advice — and reflects no affiliation with or compensation from any company named.