Exclusive Billhop discount for HfP readers – pay (almost) any bill with your Amex card

Back in September we first wrote about Billhop, a Swedish company that lets you pay almost ANY bill with a credit or charge card – including American Express cards.

You can probably imagine how this situation could be useful in your points collecting ….

If you were interested in the Billhop concept but didn’t give it a go yet, Billhop has offered Head for Points readers an exclusive discount on their transaction charge.

About Billhop

Billhop was founded in Stockholm in 2012 – where it has proven very popular with the frequent flyer community – and launched in the UK earlier this year with plans to extend further in Europe.

The company is fully regulated in Sweden (which, under EU passporting rules, means they are regulated here as well).  In any event, your money is fully protected because all payments are handled by an established bank.  Billhop never has access to your funds, apart from the fee.

The most interesting part about Billhop is that you can pay almost any bill or invoice with any Amex, Visa or Mastercard card, have it treated as a purchase and earn reward points.

More importantly to HfP readers, payments made via Billhop will also count towards spend targets on American Express cards, either for a sign-up bonus or a spending bonus such as the British Airways American Express 2-4-1 voucher.

Registration with Billhop is free – see here – so you have nothing to lose by signing up and seeing how it works.

The only major exception is that you cannot use Billhop to pay instalments on loans, mortgages or credit card bills, ie anything paid to a financial services business.  Tax paments to HMRC are OK.

Payments to private individuals are not permitted unless you are invoicing for a service – see below for more on this.

Too good to be true?

If this sounds too good to be true, there is a catch – the service is not free.  There is a 2.95% charge on every payment you make, i.e. if you pay a bill of £100, you will pay £102.95 in total.

As you will see below, there is currently a special discounted fee available to Head for Points readers.

This means that, unless you also want the cashflow benefits of putting your bills onto a credit or charge card, this is an expensive way of earning miles or points.  It is something that you may find useful if you are struggling to hit the ‘£2000 spend in 90 days for 20000 bonus points’ target on a new American Express Gold card for example.

Remember that if you run your own business and are paying company expenses, the Billhop fee is fully tax deductible.

How it works

If you’ve never used Billhop before, you need to create an online account on the Billhop website here.

Once you are signed up, you can pay almost any bill using any credit or charge card.

I explained the whole process of signing up and transferring money in this article.

In the example I transferred money into Rob’s account as neither one of us had any bills to pay at that time.  Billhop has, however, changed its rules when it comes to paying a private person.  You can now only send money to an individual if there is an invoice provided for a service rendered – so it would be OK if I was teaching his kids German and sent him a bill afterwards.

Exclusive HfP offer

For a short period Billhop is offering Head for Points readers a discount on their transaction fee. Instead of 2.95% you will only pay 2.25%.

This offer is for both existing and new customers.  We didn’t want anyone who signed up after our earlier article to lose out.

Existing customers can enter the promo code H4P2017 under ‘Settings’ whilst new customers can enter the same promo code in the registration process under the ‘How did you find out about Billhop’ section.

This offer is valid until 14th January 2018.

You can sign up for Billhop, and find out more about how they operate, on their website here.

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Want to earn more points from credit cards? – April 2024 update

If you are looking to apply for a new credit card, here are our top recommendations based on the current sign-up bonuses.

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

You can see our full directory of all UK cards which earn airline or hotel points here. Here are the best of the other deals currently available.

Earning miles and points from small business cards

If you are a sole trader or run a small company, you may also want to check out these offers:

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 12th May 2024, the Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa card is offering a bonus of 30,000 points, convertible into 30,000 Avios. You must have a Limited Company to apply. Click here to learn more and click here to apply.

For a non-American Express option, we also recommend the Barclaycard Select Cashback card for sole traders and small businesses. It is FREE and you receive 1% cashback on your spending.