Chase’s New 3/24 Rule for Sole Proprietors (What Data Points Show)

In mid-September, Chase seems to have abruptly rolled out a new 3/24 rule for people who are applying for business cards as sole proprietors. 

Reports started popping up that Chase reconsideration reps were even citing this rule to people and saying it meant they had no ability to reconsider a denied application. 

We already knew Chase had made approval odds a lot lower for sole proprietors — but this was the first time we could see a specific guideline might have appeared that reps were told to follow. 

While reading comment sections and trying to determine if there were any other factors at play, I decided to run a survey that could ask consistent questions to try to look for new patterns just as we did previously with Chase business approvals in 2024–25 and Venture Business approvals. 

Here is the survey — if you have a data point, please add it! I will update the article every time we get another 100 data points, or sooner if we find a new pattern. 

First a few disclaimers

This rumored 3/24 rule is new and while it is being cited by numerous reps, we don’t know the full limits of it. 

Don’t panic — we regularly see new guidelines roll out and also sometimes see them later rolled back. 

If you read comment sections of other blogs and Reddit and Facebook groups, you’ll see a lot of different information flying back and forth. I’m less concerned with what reps are telling people and more with what the actual data says about who is/isn’t getting approved. 

Finally, in our data, we have excluded anyone who filled out this survey and applied before 9/15 as we believe this to be when this rule rolled out. 

We already believed that sole proprietors who were holding 3+ Chase business cards were unlikely to be approved as we have data points going back 2 years that already indicate that will likely lead to a denial. 

What does 3/24 mean?

In this survey, and in these results, I have defined this as having 3 new cards show up on your credit report in the past 24 months. This usually only includes personal credit cards but can include some business cards from some banks that report business cards to your personal credit reports.

This is the same format as 5/24 which you can read about here. 

Some reps seem to be telling some people this includes Chase business and personal cards. I don’t currently believe this to be true (yes, even if reps are saying it). In the past ten years, Chase business cards have been excluded from x/24 calculations since they don’t show on personal credit reports. 

When you call reconsideration, a rep does see your entire card portfolio with Chase and can see your Chase business cards as well. Many reps seem to be saying they don’t have authorization to initiate reconsideration for sole proprietors at 3/24 or above. 

This means we believe you’d have to be at 2/24 or below to get approved. 

The data set so far

Registered businesses have a clear advantage

We’ve been finding for the past few years that registered businesses have a clear advantage when it comes to approvals. 

In the past year we’ve also found that registered business applications don’t seem bound by the new “once in a lifetime” rules on the Ink applications. 

This held true for this data set. 

Bad News for Sole Proprietorships

Overall we have seen very few approvals for sole proprietorships for people who are at 3/24 or above. 

This unfortunately held true for both Ink cards and co-branded cards. We don’t have much data for co-branded cards at this point and I generally prefer not to draw conclusions with so few data points but this is all we have so far. Again, I plan to update this 3x a week while data points are still coming in. 

Exceptions to the 3/24 rule for sole proprietors

There are a few exceptions, as we do have some limited data points of people getting approved even while being at 3/24 or above. 

United co-branded cards are the only co-branded cards we’ve seen so far with any approvals for sole proprietors at 3/24 or above. I expect we may see additional approvals for other co-branded cards as we get more data points. 

Here’s what the United approvals for people at 3/24 or above had in common. 

Ink cards seem to occasionally be approved 

Here’s what the Ink approvals for people at 3/24 or above had in common. 

It’s possible that one factor that leads to better approval odds is 0–1 Chase cards opened in the past 12 months. But this is by no means a guarantee for approval as we still saw plenty of denials even for people with only 0–1 Chase cards opened in the past 12 months. Notably, though, the data we have so far certainly points to a pattern where if you’re opening 3+ Chase cards in a 12-month period, the approval rates are very low to zero when you then apply for a business card as a sole proprietor.

As with the other factors, this does not seem to apply to registered businesses, who still saw strong approval rates regardless.