Citi PayAll now offers zero-fee option, with no miles earned

Usually we’re writing about Citi’s PayAll service to let our readers know about one of the latest promotions, which allow you to generate cheap miles for a variety of payments that typically don’t accept credit card, like property rental, taxes and insurance.

One of those deals, offering a 1.8 mpd earn rate for all Citi miles-earning cards and driving the cost per mile down to 1.11 cents each has recently finished, but sadly no new offer has come in its place just yet.

However, while we wait for a new deal, PayAll does have another alternative to its regular 2% fee for those interested.

Citi PayAll now has a zero-fee option

One new option we noticed when making a recent PayAll transaction was the ability to set up a totally fee-free payment, though of course you’ll forfeit any miles or points if you select this option.

While that likely doesn’t sound of much interest to our miles-chasing readers, it does provide a useful option to defer a large payment to your next credit card statement month, given that these payments (e.g. tax) usually can’t be made by credit card, or earn no miles if they can (e.g. insurance).

This could help you optimise your cashflow or earn some additional interest since you’ll be keeping the cash in your bank account for longer, compared to making a direct bank transfer to the supplier or payee in question.

It’s not new of course – you also get this ‘deferral benefit’ when making a miles-earning PayAll payment with the 2% service fee attached, but the primary objective in that case is almost always generating miles at an attractive cost, rather than the benefit of actually paying the bill later.

Citi PayAll also allows you to select the zero-fee option for recurring payments like monthly rental and monthly insurance premiums, deferring the date you’ll actually pay these expenses since they’ll each hit your next credit card statement (not the currently payable one).

The only exception is Income Tax payments to IRAS by instalment, which are not supported under the zero-fee option (but one-time tax payments can be zero-fee if you wish).

Example

For example, my next Citi PremierMiles statement date is on 11th March.

If I arrange a large zero-fee Citi PayAll transaction, like a S$2,000 bill for property renovation, to be paid on 12th March, it will just sneak past the cutoff and so won’t appear on my 11th March statement but actually the next statement on 11th April, which is payable only on 6th May.

I can therefore tap into a 56-day interest-free period during which I can keep that S$2,000 in my bank account, earning interest, even though Citi will happily pay my supplier on 12th March.

I’ll also have received two monthly pay checks in the meantime, in late March and late April, so this also represents a fee-free way to help optimise my cashflow, if I need to do that.

My alternative could of course be to pay the S$40 service fee (2%) and also earn 2,400 miles for this payment (S$2,000 x 1.2 mpd), but at a cost of 1.67 cents per mile, I might think that’s over the odds.

With a 2.25% fee from both ipaymy (year-round) and CardUp (de-facto year-round), the cost per mile is even higher using this card at 1.83 cents, unless I have a promo code to use.

This zero-fee method defers my payment to the next statement due date, at no additional cost to me.

This is a great solution by Citi for situations where no special offer is running for PayAll, but customers don’t want to ‘buy’ miles at the regular rates, because they think it’s too expensive.

Remember too that you can schedule a PayAll payment over four months in advance. If a special offer then comes up in the meantime (like the recent 1.8 mpd one), you can simply cancel your fee-free payment and set up a regular payment under the promotional offer including the service fee to earn miles instead, if there’s still sufficient time before the due date.

Regular PayAll cost per mile

Here’s how the year-round cost per mile looks for regular miles-earning Citi PayAll payments, at the standard 2% fee, depending on which card you use.

Regular Citi PayAll
Cost per mile

Card	Earn rate	Cost per mile (2% fee)
Citi ULTIMA	1.6 mpd	1.25¢
Citi Prestige	1.3 mpd	1.54¢
Citi PremierMiles	1.2 mpd	1.67¢
Citi Rewards	0.4 mpd	5.00¢

As you can see, with the possible exception of the Citi ULTIMA card, these aren’t really great rates to buy miles, and in the case of the Citi Rewards cards, it would be nonsensical to do this given the lousy 0.4 mpd earn rate on offer.

That’s why most of our readers only use PayAll when a promotion is running, like the most recent one which inflated the earn rate on all these cards to 1.8 mpd, which meant buying miles at 1.11 cents each, no matter which of these cards you used.

If you only hold the Citi Rewards card, you certainly won’t want to be generating miles at the high year-round cost when a promo is not running, but you might consider the zero-fee option to defer your payment to the next card statement month, giving you some breathing room before the bill has to be settled with your hard-earned cash.

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Citi has been quite aggressive with its PayAll facility, taking the likes of CardUp and ipaymy to task with regular attractive offers to make payments like rent, insurance, education and tax bills while earning miles at a competitive cost per mile.

It’s always been an indirect benefit to defer your payment when using these providers, in the sense that the actual charge will appear on your next credit card statement, which in the case of Citi cards can then give you up to 56 days until the payment is due, if you manage to time it perfectly.

For the new zero-fee option, that’s really the only benefit, since you’ll forgo any Citi Miles or Citi ThankYouPoints earning. That said, it’s not a benefit to be sniffed at – allowing you to earn more interest on your cash and/or optimise your cashflow, especially for large outgoings.

Let’s hope Citi PayAll also launches with a new bonus promotion soon for us to buy miles at more attractive rates once again for these types of payments, but in the meantime, some will find this zero-fee option a useful alternative.

(Cover Photo: Shutterstock)