American Express raised the welcome offer on every fee-paying Delta SkyMiles card through November 4, 2026, topping out at 200,000 miles on the Reserve Business. Divided by the spending each one requires, that headline offer ranks second from bottom, and the $150 Gold pays more than twice the rate. Our own archive shows Amex raised the spending requirement in step with the bonus.
American Express raised the welcome offers on every fee-paying Delta SkyMiles card on August 27, 2026. The headline is a 200,000-mile offer on the Reserve Business card, which is the largest Delta bonus we have ever recorded.
It is also close to the worst deal on this page, and the best one is on the cheapest card. Here is why.
Read from each card's own page on August 27, 2026. Amex prints the same deadline on all of them: offer ends November 4, 2026.
| Card | Annual fee | Welcome offer | Spend | Miles per $1 of spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta SkyMiles Gold | $150 | 80,000 miles + $250 statement credit | $3,000 / 6mo | 26.7 |
| Delta SkyMiles Platinum | $350 | 90,000 miles + $300 statement credit | $4,000 / 6mo | 22.5 |
| Delta SkyMiles Gold Business | $150 | 90,000 miles | $6,000 / 6mo | 15.0 |
| Delta SkyMiles Platinum Business | $350 | 100,000 miles | $8,000 / 6mo | 12.5 |
| Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business | $650 | 200,000 miles | $20,000 / 6mo | 10.0 |
| Delta SkyMiles Blue | $0 | 10,000 miles | $1,000 / 6mo | 10.0 |
| Delta SkyMiles Reserve | $650 | 2 round-trip Comfort certificates + 50,000 miles | $10,000 / 6mo | see below |
The last column is the whole article. It is the bonus divided by the spending you have to do to earn it, and it reorders the table completely.
The 200,000-mile offer finishes second from bottom. The $150 Gold card, with the smallest headline on the page, pays more than two and a half times as many miles per dollar you spend, and hands you $250 on top.
We keep an append-only archive of these pages, so we can show what the Reserve Business offer has actually done rather than describe it.
| Date | Offer | Spend | Miles per $1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 20 | 80,000 | $12,000 | 6.7 |
| July 31 | 100,000 | $12,000 | 8.3 |
| August 6 | 125,000 | $12,000 | 10.4 |
| August 12 | 100,000 | $12,000 | 8.3 |
| August 23 | 80,000 | $12,000 | 6.7 |
| August 27 | 200,000 | $20,000 | 10.0 |
Two readings, and both are true.
Against what it replaced four days earlier, this is a large improvement: 6.7 miles per dollar to 10.0. If you were going to take the August 23 offer, wait no longer.
Against the August 6 offer, it is very slightly worse. 125,000 miles for $12,000 was a marginally better rate than 200,000 for $20,000, because Amex raised the spending requirement by two thirds at the same time it raised the bonus by 150%.
The same thing happened on the other two business cards, and on one of them it is exact:
None of this makes the offers bad. It makes the headline number a poor way to compare them, which is the thing worth taking away.
The personal Reserve is the one to look at carefully, because it is not a bigger version of the old offer. It is a different kind of offer.
It used to pay a flat 125,000 miles for $9,000 of spending. It now pays two round-trip Delta Comfort certificates plus 50,000 miles for $10,000. Amex states the restrictions in the same breath as the offer, and they matter:
"Earn two round-trip Delta Comfort Flight Certificates valid for travel to the U.S. 48, Puerto Rico, or the U.S. Virgin Islands, along with 50,000 Bonus Miles after you spend $10,000 in purchases on your new Card in the first 6 months. A 21+ day advance purchase is required. Taxes and fees up to $80 per person apply."
Read the last two sentences twice. A 21-day advance purchase requirement rules out every last-minute trip, which is exactly when a free flight is worth most. And taxes and fees run up to $80 per person, so two round trips for two people can cost you up to $320 before you have flown anywhere.
We have deliberately left the miles-per-dollar column blank for it. On miles alone it computes to 5.0, the worst on the page, but that number is meaningless here because it prices two flights at zero. Whether this offer improved depends entirely on whether you would use two domestic Comfort round trips in the next year. If yes, it is plausibly the strongest offer in the table. If no, you are being paid 50,000 miles to spend $10,000.
We are not going to assign those certificates a dollar value, because their worth depends on routes and dates we cannot see from here.
If you can clear $3,000 in six months, the Gold is the answer and it is not close. Best rate on the page by a wide margin, $250 back on top, and the lowest fee of any card here that carries an offer worth having. The bar to earn it is the lowest too.
If you spend on a business and can clear $8,000, the Platinum Business at 12.5 beats the Reserve Business at 10.0, for $300 less in annual fee. The 200,000 is the bigger trophy; the 100,000 is the better trade.
The Reserve Business earns its place only if the $20,000 was going on a card anyway. If that spending is real and already budgeted, 200,000 Delta miles is a serious amount of travel and the rate is fine. If you would be manufacturing spend to reach it, the rate you are actually paying is worse than three other cards on this page.
Skip the Blue unless you want a no-fee Delta card for other reasons. 10,000 miles is a rounding error next to what the Gold pays for $2,000 more spending.
A few things that decide whether any of this applies to you, none of which we can check from our side.
Amex applies once-per-lifetime family rules to welcome offers on these cards. If you have held the card before, you may not be eligible, and the application will usually tell you before you submit.
The offer you see may not be the offer above. Amex varies welcome offers by link, by channel, and by customer. The figures here are what each card's public page showed on August 27, 2026. Check the page and your own targeted offers before you decide, and treat any number you see quoted anywhere, including here, as a starting point rather than a promise.
The deadline is real and printed by Amex: November 4, 2026. That is over two months away, so there is no reason to rush a decision you have not made yet.
Verified against each card's own page at americanexpress.com on August 27, 2026: the welcome offer, the spending requirement, the six-month window, and Amex's own "offer ends 11/4/2026" wording. Historical figures come from our own archive of those same pages, captured between July 20 and August 23, 2026. Miles-per-dollar figures are the bonus divided by the required spend and involve no valuation of a Delta mile.