Fly Further on Rent: The Missing Piece of Your Points Strategy

Let's be honest: paying rent is the ultimate black hole of personal finance. For most of us, it's the single largest transaction that leaves our bank accounts every month — £1,500, £2,000, or even more — and traditionally, it earns you absolutely nothing. While we're out here obsessing over which card gives us the best Avios per £1 on supermarket shopping or which transfer bonus to jump on, we've been ignoring the £20,000+ elephant in the room. Nuba is here to change the maths.

Most points strategies — including mine — focus on what I'd call 'discretionary spend': the 20–30% of your income you spend on dining, travel, subscriptions, and shopping. That's where the Avios stack up, where the American Express welcome bonuses get unlocked, and where the points magic happens.

But what about the other 70%? Your rent, for most people, is a completely dead transaction. The money leaves. The landlord receives it. And you're left with nothing to show for it points-wise. If you're renting in London or another major UK city, that's potentially £15,000–£25,000 a year evaporating without a single Avios earned.

That is a genuinely staggering amount of uncaptured value — and it's the gap that Nuba is designed to close.

The concept is elegantly simple, and more importantly, it removes the biggest hurdle renters face: the landlord conversation. Most landlords don't accept credit cards — and even if they did, most wouldn't want to deal with card fees or change their setup. Asking your landlord to suddenly start accepting Amex is a conversation nobody wants to have.

Here's how Nuba sidesteps all of that:

Your landlord sees the same payment they always have. No fees on their end. No awkward conversation. No disruption whatsoever. And you? You've just earned points on your biggest monthly outgoing.

Let's put some real numbers on this. If you're earning 1.5 Avios per £1 on your card (which is what I get on my Barclaycard Avios Plus), here's how your rent translates over just a few months:

Use our Avios flight calculator to see exactly what your points balance could unlock. You might be surprised how close a Business Class seat actually is.

This is where things get genuinely exciting. If you've ever looked at a card offering 60,000 or 100,000 bonus points and then squinted at the minimum spend requirement — 'spend £6,000 in the first 3 months' — and thought 'how on earth am I going to do that without buying things I don't need?', Nuba might be your answer.

Two or three months of rent through Nuba can clear almost any sign-up bonus (SUB) spending target on the market. If your rent is £2,000/month, that's £6,000 in just three months — unlocking that welcome bonus without a single penny of manufactured spend or unnecessary purchases.

Think about what that means in practice. Pick up a new American Express card with a big welcome offer, use it for rent via Nuba, hit the spend target naturally, and collect the bonus. You've just turned a few months of unavoidable expenditure into a Business Class flight or a substantial hotel redemption.

If you're a business owner, the American Express Business cards have some of the best welcome bonuses going — and combining those with rent spend via Nuba could get you to six-figure Membership Rewards balances faster than you might think.

I were renting, this would be one of the first things I'd look to set up. The logic is too compelling to ignore.

We spend a lot of energy in the points community optimising the margins — chasing triple-dips on coffee shops, jumping on transfer bonuses, signing up for hotel loyalty schemes. And those things are genuinely worth doing! But if you're a renter ignoring your single biggest monthly outgoing, you're optimising the wrong end of your spend.

Nuba does charge a fee for its service (that's how they keep the lights on), so you'll want to make sure the points value you're extracting outweighs the cost. As a general rule, if you're earning Avios or Membership Rewards points at a decent rate, the value proposition holds up well — and particularly when you're using it to hit a welcome bonus spending requirement, where the value of that bonus easily covers any fee many times over.

To maximise what you get out of Nuba, you'll want a card that earns a solid rate on general spend. Here are a few solid options for UK renters:

For the full picture, head to our UK Avios-earning credit card guide or, if you run a business, our UK business credit card recommendations.

Your rent is going to leave your bank account every single month regardless. The only question is whether it disappears silently, or quietly funds your next Business Class seat.

For renters — especially those in higher-rent cities — Nuba represents one of the most genuinely useful additions to a UK points strategy in recent memory. It's not gimmicky, it doesn't require manufactured spend, and it doesn't change a thing about how your landlord gets paid. It simply plugs the biggest gap in the points ecosystem that most of us have been ignoring.

Once you've sorted your earning strategy, use our Award Travel Finder to start planning where all those extra points could take you. You might find Business Class is closer than you think. ✈️

Jack