UOB Preferred Visa Review (2026): Contactless Spend specialist

UOB Preferred VisaTruffle's Take

🤩Wallet Staple

The best card for fuss-free contactless spending, if your phone is how you pay for everything

Almost every miles card in Singapore quietly refuses to pay on supermarkets, which is a strange thing for an entire market to agree on given it is the one bill nearly every household has. The Preferred Visa is the exception, and that alone earns it a place in a lot of wallets: online groceries earn 4 mpd here.

It works as two independent S$600 buckets, one for selected online spend and one for mobile contactless, so used properly you are earning bonus on S$1,200 a month. Most write-ups quote the S$600 and stop, which sells it short by half.

The catch is not what you buy, it is how you pay. The contactless bonus needs a phone tapped at a reader. Tapping the plastic card earns nothing extra at all, and that one detail is where almost everybody loses this bonus without ever noticing.

Annual Fee

S$196.20, waived the first year, and usually waived after that on regular use.

The part people miss: UOB charges their annual fee in points.

• UNI$ 6,500 for full waiver
• UNI$ 3,250 + S$98.10 for half waiver

And UOB automatically deducts them to waive your annual fees. This could be a really sad situation if you missed out applying for an annual fee waiver, as 6,500 UNI$ is worth roughly 13,000 miles. That is months of hard-earned miles disappearing.

So do check your Rewards+ Tab for any deductions and apply for waiver accordingly.

Welcome Bonus

None. UOB runs no sign-up bonus on this card, so the order you apply in is worth real miles.

A bank pays its welcome offer once, to someone who has not held one of its cards for roughly the last twelve months. Apply for this card first and you have spent that on a card giving you nothing for it. KrisFlyer UOB pays 5,000 miles when you apply through UOB directly, and Visa Signature carries offers through the comparison sites. Take one of those first, collect the bonus, then add this one.

How many miles do I earn?

4 miles per dollar in each of two buckets, capped at S$600 each, and 0.4 on everything else.

The cap was halved. The ceiling became roughly S$600 per bucket on 1 October 2025, so any review or forum post written before that quotes a better number than you will actually get. If the figures you have seen elsewhere look generous, check the date on them.

Where the Bonus Disappears

No clever routing to discuss on this card, so here is what actually decides whether it earns 4 mpd or 0.4 for you.

Use both buckets or half the card is doing nothing. They are separate ceilings, not a shared one. Someone who shops online and taps their phone is earning on S$1,200 a month. Someone doing only one is earning on S$600 and paying the same fee.

One small thing in your favour: UOB accumulates micro-transactions across the month rather than rounding each one down, so the S$3.20 kopi paid by phone still counts. On a card whose bonus lives on phone taps, that adds up more than you would think.

Transfer Partners

UNI$ pool across every UOB card, which matters more here than usual: on a S$600 cap it takes a while to reach a transfer block, and a second UOB card can top the balance up rather than stranding it. Blocks are 5,000 UNI$ for 10,000 miles, at S$27 a time.

UNI$ needed for 10,000 miles, off UOB’s own frequent flyer pages, checked 11 August 2026. UOB’s wording is “either KrisFlyer or Asia Miles”, so this is the whole list. S$27 an conversion, waived on Reserve, Visa Infinite and Privilege Banking. KrisFlyer takes up to 5 working days, Asia Miles up to 14.

Programme	UNI$ for 10,000 miles
Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer	5,000
Cathay Asia Miles	5,000

Expiry is 2 years from the end of the earning quarter, which is the deadline worth diarising on a card that accumulates this slowly.

Before any redemption, always check the route you want is actually available. The worst thing you can do is diversify into another mileage program with no redemption in mind.

What should I pair it with?

Worked through on S$900 of online spend in one month:

The fix is not to stop spending, it is to notice which bucket is full. Overflow from the online bucket does not roll into the contactless one, so the same S$300 paid by phone in a shop would have earned 1,200 instead of 120.

Something that earns when the phone is not an option.

The gaps here are about method and headroom rather than category, which makes the pairing unusually easy to reason about.

Build your miles card stack

One card never covers everything. Put in what you actually spend and see which cards to hold together, and what to put on each.

Build my stack→

The verdict, restated

A good card wearing an easy-to-miss condition. If your phone is already your wallet, two S$600 buckets at 4 mpd on a waivable fee is a strong everyday setup, and the grocery bonus is rarer than it sounds. If you tap the plastic out of habit, you will earn 0.4 mpd and never work out why.

Sources

UOB Preferred Visa Card T&Cs updated 10 March 2026 and the accompanying FAQ, both checked 27 July 2026. Rates, fees and caps correct as of 5 August 2026. The petrol bonus excludes SPC and Shell. The annual fee being settled out of a UNI$ balance, and the roughly 13,000 miles that represents, is from my own experience rather than a figure UOB publishes: treat it as the shape of the problem, not an exact conversion, and check your own statement. This guide shares my own experience for education, it is not financial advice, and card terms change: always verify with the bank before applying.