UOB Credit Card Waiver Criteria

 

Thanks to milelion for alerting the internet to the UOB Credit card fee waiver criteria. 

If you hold multiple credit cards with UOB, to qualify, you must spend:

S$5,500 on credit card charged w/ Annual Fee, or

S$22,000 across all UOB credit cards, or

S$3,000 in overseas spend across all UOB credit cards

UOB publishes criteria for credit card annual fee waivers - The MileLion

Its good to know that your spending on one UOB card can help you get waiver for other UOB cards. My hotel bookings (either paying on the hotel website or making a reservation where payment is only made at check in) easily hit S$3k a year so that explains why my waiver for my Krisflyer card was successful.

This means that I can apply for another UOB card to use in the occasional months that I hit my $1.2k spending cap on my UOB Visa Signature. I'm currently looking at UOB Preferred Visa. If I read the milelion review correctly, it seems that NTUC Fairprice online or via app payment qualifies for 4mpd, which the UOB VS doesn't have. That's pretty useful as I don't have a 4mpd card for online groceries yet.  

UOB Krisflyer fee waiver

 

The credit card annual fee will appear in the bill for the month after the month printed on the card. Once it appears, you have to go to the UOB App to apply for waiver. After submitting the waiver, I got an automatic response that it was waived. 

The fact that it was immediately waived suggests that there is some sort of preset criteria, and the simplest criteria would be annual spend. From an IT perspective, its not cost effective (within the context of a super secure banking system) to do some sort of multi-factorial algorithm that pulls data from all sorts of places to decide whether to waive or not. 

As a data point, I think my spending on this card is about $1k a month, so good to know that is sufficient to get a waiver.

Contactless Spending for Oct 2025

 

To recap, UOB Visa Signature generates 4mpd for contactless transactions with a minimum spend of $1k and a spending cap of $1.2k. The spending for this card has to be during the statement month (see Milelion's review of the card for an explanation of the difference between statement month and calendar month). Fortunately, my statement date is the 2nd of each month so its virtually the same as calendar month. 

I thought it would be useful to document my $1k contactless spending on my credit card in a month when I had no big ticket items (no single item costing more than $100) to see what my spending pattern is like. Obviously if I bought a big ticket item, the spending chart would be quite skewed.

My main contactless spending is understandably F&B at 51%. This includes restaurants, takeaway food, and Starbucks. Many restaurants have switched to ordering via QR code but most collect payment at the counter or have the option open, so that I can make a contactless payment.

On months when I am making a big ticket purchase which results in the $1.2k cap being hit early, I can shift my F&B spending to the UOB Krisflyer card which gives 3mpd for dining.

Its great that the SQ Annual Time to Fly sale takes place after the Global Redemption Sale, because you get to use up your miles first on discounted redemption tickets, and then whatever you are unable to redeem, you use cash. Makes more sense than the other way round.

For this year's sale, I bought one biz class ticket to Australia for $4.5k. That translates to roughly:

• 11,500 miles (to be earned after flying):  +25% booking class bonus +25% Elite Silver bonus (yup, my Elite Gold has expired)
• 13,500 miles from UOB Krisflyer Credit Card (3mpd)
• Total 25,000 miles.

Miles Strategy

 

Someone asked in the HWZ forum about miles and there were the usual doubts expressed whether it was worth chasing miles. Coincidentally, I have just started to learn more about miles collecting, mainly from the milelion website, and my short answer is that if you are going to spend the money, then why not make sure you get some miles from it? For me, I got no interest holding 10 credit cards and min-maxxing the miles, but I feel I reached an easy-to-follow 'middle ground'.

HOW MUCH TO SPEND TO GET AN AIR TICKET?

Again, thanks to milelion constantly scanning the SQ website so I don't have to, I redeemed 3 return air tickets to Japan for 2026 at 43,200 miles each.

If you were a min-maxxer with a 4mpd card, you would be able to achieve 43,200 miles with no more than S$10,800 spend. The MMs will take advantage of promos that increase the mile earn rate above 4mpd, so their average earn rate will often be above 4mpd.

For myself, I only have 2 cards so my effective mpd is less than 4mpd, but it keeps things simple.

UOB Visa Signature - assuming $1,000-$1,200 contactless payments a month, that will give 48,000-57600 miles at 4mpd.  (Bonus activated at $1k spend, max cap $1.2k).

UOB KF Credit Card - assuming $1,000 a month of qualifying transactions at 2.4mpd plus $12k worth of SQ/Scoot/Pelago/Kris+ spending at 3mpd, that will give 28800 +36,000 =64,800 miles. (there are also miles awarded by SIA which are separate)  UOB KF has no spending cap, so the $1+1k/month is more like my estimate of spending.

So very roughly, if I have $3k/month of qualifying spending at maybe 3mpd (average of a 4mpd and a 3.0/2.4mpd card), that will be good for some economy tix to Japan every year when they have their global redemption sale.

Remember your unused miles

Remember that each time you fly Scoot / SQ on tickets you buy, you earn miles from the flight. Very often, these miles alone aren't enough to redeem a flight. But when they are added to the miles you earn from credit card spend, at least they are not 'wasted'. For example:

• Singapore-Sydney Business lite (the cheapest biz ticket) return nets you 9,780 miles.
• Singapore-Tokyo Economy value return nets you 3,294 miles

I selected these examples of actual flights I would take. Sydney is long enough that I would want to fly Biz, but Tokyo flights are short enough to fly economy.

Miles Millionaire: Whats that??

Finally, I note that some influenzas like to flex they are "miles millionaires" and this term appears to have been 'endorsed' by the official SIA Krisflyer instagram account:

While a million dollars invested will grow your networth through compounding, I fail to see how accumulating one million miles will do anything for you. In fact, miles depreciate over time. My strategy is to redeem flights as soon as possible. I have enough in my account to redeem a ticket or two just in case there is some not to be missed fantastic sale, but even then, its way less than 100,000 miles.

Tempting to Min-max?

I will try my best to stick to 2 credit cards and not get influenced by these influencers... though there is certainly a temptation to go up to 3 cards if my spending increases enough to justify a 3rd card (hopefully not).

 

 

UOB Krisflyer Credit Card 3 to 2.4 MPD nerf

 Milelion.com, which is a pretty informative site, just reported that wef 1 June 2025, UOB Krisflyer Credit Card will be nerfed from 3 to 2.4 MPD, a 20% cut.  I just applied for the card at the start of the year. I am not sure what the alternatives are so I will continue to use this card, given the Visa Signature's $1+1k cap.

My 2nd Credit Card

 

In terms of managing finances, one of my first actions in 2025 was to apply for a UOB Krisflyer Credit Card. I currently only have one main UOB credit card for spending but there is a spending cap which I bust every time I buy air tickets.

I needed a 2nd card that ideally would maximise points/miles from big ticket spending. For example, in the last SQ sale, I bought 1 biz and 1 economy tix so the ideal card would give me max value from that.

After browsing various bank websites and reading the reviews in milelion.com, I settled on this card as it has uncapped 3.0 mpd on SQ,Scoot tickets, and other categories like online shopping (which appears to include Amazon.sg) and Kris+. I haven't signed up for Kris+ but I'll look into it to see if it suits my spending patterns.

I'm sure there better ways to optimise the use of this card, but for now, I plan to use it for air tickets and big ticket online shopping that qualifies for the 3.0pmd.