Earning Avios for paying your council tax and other utilities
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Your council tax bill for 2015/6 will have dropped through your letterbox in the last few days. Earning Avios or other points by paying your day-to-day bills is something that a lot of people ignore.
Unfortunately, because of the huge range of utility companies, it is difficult to write a detailed post on paying utility bills by credit card. I have been doing this for years, though, when I can. There are a couple of things always worth remembering:
Some utility companies keep quiet about their willingness to take credit cards. For example, I don’t have a current bill to hand to double-check, but Thames Water bills used to not mention their willingness to take credit cards. They presumably wanted to avoid paying the processing cost if they could. Yet, head over to the Thames Water website and you’ll see that Visa and MasterCard credit cards are accepted – with NO surcharge.
Some companies do add a surcharge for paying with a credit card. You need to do the maths to see if it is worthwhile. Our phone and broadband contract is with Sky, for example, and is about £30 per month. Sky charges a 50p surcharge for credit card billing. This is worth it for me, because I have an old-style bmi MasterCard which gives 2.5 Avios per £1. If you take an expensive Sky TV package, even a less lucrative Visa or MasterCard may be worth using.
3V Virtual Visa cards are still accepted by some utility companies – and you can buy these with an Amex in Tesco. 3V cards are Visa-branded pre-paid cards which are sold at face value in Tesco and elsewhere. They are currently tricky to find because they are being rebranded at pay.com. Not all utility companies take them – Vodafone and Sky are OK I believe, as are some energy groups. Buy £50-worth as a test – that will trigger 150 bonus Clubcard points for spending £50 on gift cards – and see if they go through. If not, you can use them for Amazon gift cards and / or use them for your usual online shopping.
Most interesting, though, is this one: It seems, very occasionally, that some companies who do NOT take credit cards do let the odd one slip through! My local authority is Kensington & Chelsea. They are adamant that only debit cards are accepted for online payment – the website says:
“we accept British-issued debit cards for MasterCard and Visa and Switch, Solo, Visa Electron, Delta and Maestro Debit cards”
However, for the last four years, I have successfully used my bmi MasterCard or my Marriott MasterCard to pay my bill! This is very attractive for me as there is no surcharge at all.
It doesn’t work with all cards. I once tried using a Tesco MasterCard and the system recognised, correctly, that it was a credit card and not a debit card. I have no idea why some cards work – presumably there is a database somewhere that tells the payment system which cards are credit cards, and some must have been missed off!
It is all very odd, when you think about it. Because of the cut taken by the card processor, my council presumably receives less money than it is expecting. I am credited with having paid the full amount, however, and the council clearly never bothers to try to reconcile the difference.
If you have any interesting stories about settling utility bills on points-earning plastic, please post them below.
Rich Spencer 
Polly 
Kip 
Will B 
Stuart 
Romano 
Sam 
Worzel 
Moog 
louie-m 
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