If you’ve been following Chexy lately, you’ll know they’ve been chipping away at the list of payments that don’t earn rewards. Rent, then bills, then taxes, then tuition.
Mortgages were always the exception.
As of this morning, that’s changed. Chexy and Aeroplan have expanded their partnership to cover mortgage payments, earning you 1 Aeroplan point per dollar with virtually any Canadian lender.
No refinancing, no switching banks, and no conversation with your lender required.
The first thing I did was pull the terms, because the announcement doesn’t mention what this costs. It’s 1.75% per payment, and that number changes everything about whether this is worth doing.
How the Mortgage Payments Work
You link the chequing account you already pay from, and Chexy takes over the payment.
Chexy hands you a void cheque, and you give your lender those account details so it pulls from Chexy instead of from you. Chexy debits your chequing account on your payment due date, holding the money briefly in a trust account with Peoples Trust Company.
Your lender never has to know or approve anything beyond the new account details, which is how Chexy can work with every residential mortgage lender in the country.
To enrol you need to be a Canadian resident who has reached the age of majority, hold an Aeroplan account in good standing, be a borrower on a residential mortgage, and clear Chexy’s identity verification.
One detail worth catching in the terms. Points are calculated on the amount that reaches your lender, excluding the fee, and rounded down each time.
There’s no cap on how many points you can earn.
Worth knowing, Chexy is unusually direct about the arrangement underneath all this. It buys the points from Air Canada at its own cost, and the terms say the fee is the price of the payment service rather than a payment for points. You pay the same fee whether or not the points ever land in your account.
New Users Can Earn Up to 7,000 Bonus Points
There’s a launch offer running alongside the mortgage program for new Chexy users, and the two halves work differently enough to read closely.
- 1,000 Aeroplan points when you add your Aeroplan number and complete your first payment
- Up to 6,000 Aeroplan points through household bill payments, at 125 points per qualifying payment on up to four payments per month
Note that the second half is tied to bill payments rather than your mortgage. Hitting the full 7,000 means running your utilities, insurance, or condo fees through Chexy as well.
That offer ends on September 30, 2026.
What’s the Fee for Mortgage Payments via Chexy?
Strip away the announcement language and this is simpler than it looks. You hand Chexy 1.75 cents, and Chexy hands you one Aeroplan point.
This isn’t an earn rate the way a credit card multiplier is an earn rate. It’s a purchase.
So the only question is whether 1.75 cents is a fair price. At our valuation of 2 cents per Aeroplan point, you clear a quarter of a cent per dollar, or about 0.25% on your mortgage.
On a $2,500 (CAD) monthly payment over a year, that’s $525 in fees against 30,000 points worth roughly $600 (CAD).
Seventy-five dollars a year isn’t going to change your life. If you value Aeroplan points below 1.75 cents, it runs at a loss outright.
Framing the price a different way helps, though. Aeroplan’s own points-and-cash buyback sits around 1.9 to 2 cents per point, and the best buy-points promotions land higher still.
At 1.75 cents with no cap, this is the cheapest reliable way for a Canadian to buy Aeroplan points, using money that was leaving your account regardless.
Lower Your Fees by Subscribing to Chexy Plus
Launched only recently, Chexy Plus is a subscription tier, and it shifts the arithmetic enough to be worth understanding before you sign up for anything.
Chexy Plus takes the fee to 1.5%, but only on the annual plan at $200 (CAD) a year. The $20 (CAD) monthly plan keeps the standard 1.75%, so paying more each month gets you less.
At 1.5% you’re buying Aeroplan points at 1.5 cents, which doubles your margin to half a cent per dollar.
Break-even is the catch. Recovering that $200 takes $80,000 in annual payments, or a mortgage near $6,700 per month.
Below that, the subscription costs more than it saves. The threshold drops if you also run rent or utilities through Chexy, since the lower rate covers everything on the platform.
Rates compare like this:
| Rate | How you get it |
|---|---|
| 1.75% | Standard, no subscription |
| 1.5% | Chexy Plus, annual plan only |
| 1.0% | Gold Referrer, 5 referrals |
| 0.5% | Elite Referrer, 10 referrals |
The Plus discount doesn’t stack with the referral tiers, and only the better rate applies.
Whether those referral tiers touch mortgage payments is unclear, since the mortgage terms name Chexy Plus and say nothing about referrals. That is a question worth asking before you chase referrals expecting a cheaper mortgage.
Status Qualifying Credits Are the Real Prize
What really caught my eye wasn’t the earn rate. It’s the status.
Every payment earns 1 Status Qualifying Credit per 5 Aeroplan points, which lands it in the Everyday Partners bucket of Aeroplan’s SQC system. At 1 point per dollar, that’s 1 SQC for every $5 (CAD) you pay.
Everyday Partners caps at 25,000 SQC per calendar year across all partners.
Why does that matter? Non-flight earning tops out at 50,000 SQC per year, split evenly between credit card spend and partner activity.
Filling the card half has always been possible with $125,000 on a premium Aeroplan card. Filling the partner half has been close to impossible, because everyday partners rarely run at that volume.
A mortgage does. Various monthly payments land like this, assuming you’ve maxed the card half at 25,000 SQC:
| Monthly payment | Points per year | Partner SQC | Total with card SQC | Tier reached |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $2,500 | 30,000 | 6,000 | 31,000 | Aeroplan 25K |
| $4,200 | 50,400 | 10,080 | 35,080 | Aeroplan 35K |
| $10,400 | 125,000 | 25,000 | 50,000 | Aeroplan 50K |
Sit with that bottom row for a second. Aeroplan 50K means Star Alliance Gold and worldwide lounge access, earned without boarding a plane.
Both of those paths still need $125,000 in annual card spend, so this is a narrow door. It’s a door that didn’t exist yesterday.
Can You Pay with a Credit Card?
Here’s where anyone who uses Chexy for rent should slow down.
Mortgage payments can’t be funded by a credit card. The money comes out of your chequing account by pre-authorized debit, and Chexy answers the question in one line, saying mortgage payments come from the same account you pay from today.
Losing the card removes the stack that makes the rent product work so well. With rent, you pay 1.75% and collect the Chexy bonus plus whatever your card earns, so a premium Aeroplan co-branded card at 1.25 points per dollar turns a thin deal into a strong one.
Here, 1 point per dollar is all there is. No card multiplier, no help toward a welcome bonus, and no minimum spend knocked down.
It also means our existing Chexy offer coverage needs a correction, since it lists mortgage payments as ineligible. They’re eligible now, just on different rails.
Fine Print Worth Reading Before You Enrol
Several details sit in the terms that never made the announcement.
Points are calculated on the payment amount only, so the fee itself earns nothing. There’s no minimum or maximum payment amount either, though your bank’s daily debit limits still apply.
Remittance usually happens on your scheduled payment date, though it can take up to seven business days in some circumstances. Late fees or penalties caused by a failed payment are your responsibility, not Chexy’s.
That last part deserves a second look. A missed rent payment is an awkward conversation with a landlord.
Missing a mortgage payment is a different category of problem, and inserting a third party into that chain is a real consideration even if the risk is small.
Is This a Good Deal?
My honest take is that this depends entirely on whether you care about status.
Say you have a large mortgage, redeem for premium cabins at 2 cents or better, and sit anywhere near a status tier, this is an easy call. The points roughly cover the fee and the SQC arrive free.
Chasing Aeroplan 50K and already max a premium co-branded card, it gets better than that. The partner bucket has been the hardest 25,000 SQC in the program to fill, and this is the first everyday earn with the volume to fill it.
Judged on points alone, buying Aeroplan currency at 1.75 cents is fine and nothing more. A quarter of a cent per dollar is thin payment for adding a third party to your mortgage chain.
On SQC, it’s the most interesting thing to happen to Aeroplan status earning since the system launched. Air Canada built a framework with a 25,000 SQC partner bucket almost nobody could fill, and a mortgage is the first everyday payment large enough to fill it.
Two things I’d want before signing up. Chexy flags the annual plan as a limited-time offer, so the $200 (CAD) price may not hold. Watch the fee itself, because Chexy reserves the right to change it and the earn rate on notice.
Conclusion
My honest take is that this launch is a win. The mortgage has spent years as the one major payment that earned Canadians nothing, and as of today it earns Aeroplan points and SQC with virtually any lender. The status earning alone is a path that didn’t exist yesterday.
Your homework is the value proposition. Sit down with your own redemption habits and check whether the points and SQC you’d earn are worth more to you than the 1.75% fee, because that answer looks different for a premium cabin flyer chasing status than for someone redeeming short-haul economy.
If credit card payments ever become eligible for mortgages, this turns into a very compelling option, since the card earning and welcome bonuses would stack on top of everything here. I’ll be watching for that one.
This story originally appeared on princeoftravel
