Owning Disney Vacation Club is a great way to keep the memories and joy of Disney year after year for your family. But annual dues can be the biggest expense after paying for your contract, and January can sneak up on you after the holiday season. But with some the right strategy, you can greatly reduce your portion or wipe it out completely this next year.
How DVC Dues Work
When you buy Disney Vacation Club, you purchase a set number of “points” at a home resort. Each year you also pay an annual fee for the upkeep of the resort. This fee is proportional to how many points you own and you are charged a fee per point that you own. In addition, each resort has different cost, so these dues vary depending on where you own. For instance, Grand Floridian and Polynesian have less cost (I think because they share with large hotels and also don’t have a huge amount of land) and so the annual fee for 2025 was $7.93 per point, while as Vero beach on the coast of the Atlantic has a lot of Hurricane repairs and has a whopping fee of $14.30/point!
These annual dues are for the length of the contract so it’s important to do your research and keep annual dues in mind when purchasing at a resort.
How Credit Card Rewards Can Reduce Your Dues
Although you can’t pay Member services directly for your dues using reward points or miles, you can use the rewards you have earned throughout the year (or by opening a new card) to reimburse yourself for the expense. Cash back cards, and travel miles, or bank bonuses are your friend when it comes to covering your expense.
Capital One Cards
We love these cards for all things Disney, but most owners don’t know that Capital One Venture and Venture X cards are a DVC owners best friend. Not only can you use these miles for dining and merchandise at WDW and Aulani, air travel and rental cars, you can also use it to pay for your dues! This is because DVC dues code as travel when you use your Capital One Venture card, so you can use the “cover travel expenses” section of your app to get a statement credit for your expense. If you have 50,000 miles, you can cover $500 of your dues.
Just make sure that in your membership account, you have listed your Capital One Venture as the card for payment. You can pay yourself back with this credit up to 90 days after the charge is made with Disney Vacation Club, so don’t forget to go into your rewards online and use this by March/April.
If you have large expenses with your dues.. one of the best options is to use a venture x business card or a spark business card.
Bank of America Cards
If you don’t want to worry and just want cash back to use towards your dues there are three cards that are a good option from Bank of America: US Bank Triple Cash Business, US bank business Leverage, and US bank Business Altitude Connect. These sign up bonuses range from $500-750 dollars.
Chase Cards
Chase cards there are a couple of options to use your points that you can use to cover your dues.
Aeroplan- This card is new to this concept. Although its an airline card, you can use aeroplan points at a 1.25 cash out rate for travel expenses. This makes 70,000 aeroplan points for example $875 dollars worth of travel.
Ink Cards– These are great 0 annual fee business cards that allow you to cash them out. I prefer to pair my ink cards with sapphire preferred or ink preferred cards so I can transfer out to transfer partners. Here is our beginner guide to points and miles if you don’t know what that means!
Sapphire card– The sapphire card is one of the best points and miles cards on the market. I tend to transfer my points with this card and use points I earn from other cards to help cover my dues. Here is our guide all to the sapphire card and Disney.
Reserve card (business and personal)– Sometimes “pay yourself back” categories allow you to use points to cover at a higher rate at 1.25 instead of the standard 1 cent you get the rest of the year.
Freedom unlimited and freedom flex- These cards are cashback cards but I find that other cards above get bigger “sign on” bonuses and these are more to earn more points (because of their categories) vs what I use towards my dues.
Using Disney Gift Cards
When using Disney gift cards you do have to call Disney Vacation Club in order to use them for your DVC dues. We have a blog post on all the ways we have found to save on Disney gift cards.
Bank Bonuses
You can use money that you have earned from Bank Bonuses to pay for your Dues. We love to refer to this website for current offers online. Make sure to read all of the details to follow all the rules so you can get your bonus.
Our Free Guides
- Here are our favorite cards for Disney.
- FREE Beginner guide to credit cards points and miles
- Our full points and miles course for Disney World
Open a New Card
Maybe you don’t have points and miles to pay for your DVC dues and plan to use cash instead. Then open a new credit card and put the dues on your new card to receive a large bonus of credit card points. You can then use these points for travel in the upcoming year for Disney travel or other family vacations. I like to open a card before the holidays and then use my annual dues as a big expense so I’m not stressed about hitting the minimum spend for a new travel card.
Not Using all Your Points?
DVC does lt you rent our extra points that you aren’t using for the year. This can be a great way to offset dues if you aren’t using your full points for the year. Here is the breakdown of “does disney allow you to rent out your points”
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