I recently had a large purchase come up, and it had to go on cc, so I used my best rewards cc for the situation which is my citi doublecash (2% back). My limit is $9,500 and this purchase brought me to just over $9,000 on the card. I paid the charge off immediately, so when my statement ends it should post with just a few hundred on it and be well under the 10% utilization.
Is doing this likely to cause a problem or issue? I am going to run into this same scenario a couple times over the next couple months, and I would prefer to use my best rewards. I wasn't anticipating that only cc payments would be accepted, so I didn't sign up for any new cards. I could potentially try to sign up for more cards and easily meet the minimum spend with the other planned transactions.
Is citi likely to give me an increased limit due to spending so close to my limit? They've been keeping me at $9,500 so I am just out of the next pricing tier for TL, and they've denied my last couple requests for credit increases.
It's unlikely but possible. As I'm sure you know, CCs typically only report statement balances to the CRAs, but they are not restricted from reporting it at other times, so you conceivably run the risk of the CC reporting a mid-cycle balance (for whatever reason) and then aggravating any AUs you have on there.
For simplicity's sake and to avoid any risk of the above, I separate my daily CC usage from my piggybacking cards.
Spending close to your limit might induce Citi to raise your limit. Usually that's one factor they look at. The other big one is your reported household income. And then of course your overall credit score and history.
I suspect, but cannot confirm, that AUs looking at their card options will pick the highest limit and oldest card within a given price range. So if your Citi gets raised to $10.1K, and it's now mixed in with a bunch of other cards that range from $10K to $20K for the same price, I would imagine that a hypothetical AU would pick someone else's $19.8K limit card over yours. So you have to decide if that tradeoff is worth it to you.
But AUs are not the most rational of financial actors, and I can't fully explain the relative popularity of my cards' slots with the above logic, so it's maybe just a hypothetical concern.