a blue credit card with white text

How to Pay Bills with the American Express Serve Card

Share this post

To pay a bill (credit card bill, mortgage payment, car payment, whatever), log into your Serve account and click Pay Bills under the Pay & Transfer tab.

Serve Home Pay Bills

If you have never paid a bill in Serve, you will need to add a payee.  To do so, click Pay a Bill.

Bill Pay Home Page

If you are paying a credit card company, select business, type the name of the company, and click search.  Make sure you select the right payee, look for the credit card company’s name and the word credit card in the name.

Search Citi Serve

Enter a nickname for the payee and your account number.  If you are paying a credit card bill, your account number is the 15-16 digit credit card number on the front of your card.  Then click Save and Pay.

Enter Citi Card Info 2

Enter the amount you want to pay and click Review.

Pay $1000 Citi Serve

Verify that the information looks correct, enter your Serve PIN, and click Submit.

Enter PIN Serve Bill Pay

Congratulations, you just paid a bill with Serve!

Pill Payment Sent

To view your payees or pay new bills, go back to the bill pay page.

Serve Home Pay Bills

From here, you can pay another bill by adding another payee, you can view current bill payments, and even cancel/edit a current bill payment.

All Bill Payees

By clicking the View Activity link, you can see more info about your bill payment.

View Recent Bill Pay Activity

At you Serve home page, you will see your latest bill payment at the top of your recent account transactions.

Recent Payment Activity

Clicking the bill payment reveals more information about the bill payment.

View Bill Payment Details

You will also receive a confirmation email from Serve with details about your bill payment.

Serve Confirmation Email for Bill Payment

In 2-3 business days, your bill payment will post to your account.  To learn how to make a mortgage payment, please check out this ClubThrifty post.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.


Share this post

46 thoughts on “How to Pay Bills with the American Express Serve Card

  1. Ryan

    When adding a Payee (that is already in their system), I keep getting a message saying:

    You have the following errors.

    You have the following errors.Sorry,it looks like the account number you entered is incorrect(you may need to enter a 5 or 9 digit account numbers).Please try again.

    The account number is right….have you run into anything like this?

    Reply
  2. Jason Yang

    Hi, I was wondering if I could use the bill pay to pay myself or someone else frequently.
    Thanks for your help and reply

    Reply
    1. Grant

      You can pay who ever you want whenever you want, assuming your account balance is large enough and that you don’t exceed $10,000 in bill payments per month. Have a great weekend!

      Reply
      1. Will

        To pay American Express cards do you simply choose American Express as the payee and enter your credit card number as the account number? Thanks

        Reply
  3. eusticetilley

    Online deposits attract me to Serve because the Walmart is a three-hour trip. Can you “pay bills” by transferring money to a personal checking account? It just makes me queasy to pay Chase directly from an account I funded from Chase.

    Reply
    1. Grant

      Yes, you can withdraw funds from Serve to your bank account. I wouldn’t worry about sending a bill payment to your Chase credit card that funds your account. I have done that several months in a row. I don’t think Serve or the credit card company cares.

      Reply
  4. chris

    Hi Grant,
    You said as long as you don’t exceed $10,000 in Bill pay a month. But you can only load a maximum of $5000 a month to a serve card with CC and gift cards. So is this allowed only if you have a bank account linked to your serve card? Don’t really see the purpose of doing that since you can just as easily pay your bills from your checking account and your not earning any point/miles either way.

    Reply
    1. Grant

      I actually don’t know if the $10,000 monthly bill pay feature is enforced, since I’ve occasionally paid more than $10,000 per month in bills. I have 3 Serve Cards, so I usually move money from 2 of the cards to my main Serve Card which I have several bill payments set up.

      Reply
  5. fan

    Hi, I am wondering whether I can use my csp card to load all the $1000 each month…Will it lead to my chase card be closed? I spend a lot on my csp card.

    Reply
  6. Diana

    Thank you Grant for the post ! I have a serve account but never used . I am going to pay my property tax with serve so I can earn some mileages from my credit card . Do I just need to add money from credit card to serve account then use pay bill — enter county tax office address ( where we sent our check to) and our tax account # , serve will send a check to tax office , right ? Thank you …

    Reply
    1. Grant

      Yes, you are exactly right Diana. Just load funds to your Serve Card, then do a bill payment to your tax office and include your account number. They will either ACH the funds to the tax department or mail a check to their office.

      Reply
  7. JC

    Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but is it possible to pay federal taxes via Serve debit? I have a quarterly tax bill every few months and I was thinking about knocking out some minimum spends via serve.

    Reply
      1. JC

        What about using the debit card with one of the IRS options and paying the 2.95 or whatever? Or am I misunderstanding the way serve works?

        Reply
        1. Grant

          I haven’t tried this personally, but I think it is difficult to use an AMEX card (Serve or Bluebird) as a debit card online. Something about having 15 digits vs. 16 digits. I’m not an expert on this field, but I think Frequent Miler is. I would send him an email or tweet him your question. Please let me know what you find out.

          Reply
          1. Diana

            Hi Grant , my citi Visa card showed serve transaction as cash advanced charges ! It was not like this when the charges just posted but now all changed to cash advance ! Any idea why this happened ? Thanks ..

          2. Grant

            I think Citi or AMEX Serve changed how they process online Serve reloads. Previously, they went through as a normal purchase, but recently, it looks like something changed. I think Citi is starting to charge cash advance fees for online Serve reloads. I use Chase Freedom and I know other Chase credit cards work as well. Barclays cards are safe too. Can you use one of those cards instead?

          3. Diana

            No , like I said when I first got to this site , I need to earn mileage with my citi advantage card ! I just called citi card try to lower cash advance limit to zero , they said the lowest they can do is $750 ! This is strange , my card limit is $6000, don’t know where is this $750 come from … Is there anyway I can get back these cash advance fees ? Thanks …

          4. Grant

            If you want to earn AA miles, you can buy $500 Visa GCs and load them to your Serve Card at Walmart. Online Serve reloads will no longer work with Citi credit cards. You can try to call Citi and have them waive the cash advance fees from your previous online Serve reloads.

  8. Dave

    I tried paying my Barclays with Serve and got returned payment fees. Is that normal? In other words, is the only way to pay CC with Serve the way you demonstrated above, and NOT by adding Serve as a payment source on the CC website? Thanks and sorry for the ignorance on this.

    Reply
    1. Grant

      It is super easy to pay credit card bills from Serve. I would recommend sending a bill payment from Serve to Barclays than going to the Barclays website and pulling a payment from your Serve account. Sorry you got hit with a return payment fee.

      Reply
  9. CUJO

    How long after requesting the payment from Serve to CC does it usually take to post to account (paying either Barclaycard and AMEX)?

    Reply
    1. Grant

      2-3 business days on average. Weekends and holidays can make the transfer take a bit longer. Most of the time, you will get an email from the credit card company thanking you for making a payment.

      Reply
    1. Grant Post author

      Hi Joe, if you used Serve to pay a bill and the payment never arrived, I would contact Serve and ask them to stop payment and reissue the payment.

      Reply

Got something to say?