I have the Hilton American Express Business card so I'm earning base points with each purchase. Does anything happen to the points if a purchase is refunded? I'm assuming that they do since otherwise you could get free points by buying and returning things. Obviously if the return is in the same billing period it's not an issue since they haven't given the points. But what if the return is a future billing period? I was wondering if they leave the points alone since you now have a credit which will mean that you don't earn any points on purchases until you've used it up.

Also wondering if the policy is different for earned Hilton points and the base points that they're giving until the end of the year.

I don't know about this card specifically, but with Amexes in other countries and other cards, if the points are already transferred to the loyalty scheme, your card account just has negative points after a refund posts.

Future spending will earn points as normal but they will go towards paying off the negative points first. Only when the debt is paid off will points be transferred to your loyalty scheme.

You may be able to close the card account with a negative points balance meaning that you get to keep the free points, but if you keep doing this the card provider may not be happy with you.

I have the Amex Aspire and track all my points earnings carefully. IME the HH points awarded from the CC for a given month factors in any refunds to the CC account during that month's billing cycle. Amex also factors in the points multipliers (e.g. Aspire earns 7 points per dollar at restaurants, 14 points per dollar at HH properties, etc.) for each specific credit to your account. As an example, I had a credit from an HH property in my last billing cycle and Amex deducted 14 points per dollar of the credited amount from the total HH points awarded for the month.

I've also had credits from charges made during prior billing cycles and the HH points deduction behavior was the same, including the various multipliers. I've never had a case where the amount of credits in a billing cycle would result in a negative net HH points awarded however, so I can't offer any experience on that.

I realize that the Amex Biz card is a different card from the Aspire, but I suspect that the HH points behavior would be identical.

So when the credits are given in a future cycle, you basically earn less in that future cycle. Let’s keep it simple and assume everything is at the same multiplier. I’ll use 3. In February you spend $6,000 and earn 18,000 points. March and April are normal. Then in May you return something that you bought in February that cost $2,000. You also spent $5,000 in May.

The card would only award you 9,000 points in May because the credit would come off off the $5,000 you spent in May. They don’t go back and remove 6,000 and award 15,000. Although I guess it might be hard to know what they actually do behind the scenes.

I’m wondering what would happen if you go negative. Like in the same scenario, what happens if only spent $1,000 in May? You just get zero points for May and then they take another 3,000 points off your June total?

The bolded part is exactly what happens. I build a spreadsheet at each month's Amex statement closing that tallies all of my purchases and credits for the month along with their respective points multipliers. The math always works our exactly as you describe above in your May example.

BTW, there's a link in your on line Amex account that lets you download all of your transactions as an Excel file, so it's easy to track everything.

I've never been in that situation, so no help there. I imagine that it's possible Amex could impose retroactive adjustments to prior month's point earnings, or they could just carry a points deficit over to the next month(s) and not award any points until the deficit is covered.

Thanks for all of the information.