Can You Pay Your Macy's Credit Card With Another Credit Card?

It's a question that comes up more often than you'd think — especially when cash flow is tight or you're trying to consolidate payments. The short answer is: no, you generally cannot pay a Macy's credit card bill directly with another credit card. But the longer answer involves understanding why that rule exists, what your actual options are, and what the workarounds look like in practice.

Why Credit Card Issuers Don't Accept Credit Card Payments

Macy's credit cards — issued through Citibank — follow the same standard policy held by virtually every major card issuer: you cannot use one credit card to directly pay the balance on another.

The reason is structural. When you make a credit card payment, the issuer expects funds drawn from a bank account — a checking or savings account with actual cash behind it. Credit cards represent borrowed money. Allowing one line of credit to pay off another would essentially let consumers borrow indefinitely without any real repayment, which creates serious risk for lenders.

This isn't a Macy's-specific restriction. It applies across Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and store card networks alike.

What Payment Methods Macy's Does Accept

Macy's offers several legitimate ways to pay your card balance:

• Online via macys.com — link a checking or savings account and pay directly
• Macy's mobile app — same bank account-based payment, handled from your phone
• Automatic payments (AutoPay) — schedule minimum or full payments from a bank account
• By phone — call the number on the back of your card and provide bank account details
• By mail — send a check or money order to the payment address on your statement
• In-store — pay at a Macy's register using cash, check, or debit card

Notice what's missing from that list: another credit card. Every method above routes back to either cash, a debit instrument, or a bank account.

The Workarounds — And the Tradeoffs 💳

If you're looking for ways to effectively use credit to cover a Macy's card balance, a few indirect methods exist. Each comes with meaningful tradeoffs.

Cash Advances

Some credit cards allow cash advances — essentially borrowing cash against your credit line, which you can then deposit into a bank account and use to make a payment. However:

• Cash advances typically carry higher APRs than regular purchases
• Interest on cash advances usually begins immediately — there's no grace period
• Most cards also charge a cash advance fee (commonly a percentage of the amount withdrawn)

Using a cash advance to pay a credit card bill can turn a manageable balance into a more expensive one quickly.

Balance Transfer Cards

A balance transfer moves debt from one credit card to another — often to a card offering a promotional low or 0% APR period. Some balance transfer cards will accept store card balances like Macy's.

This approach can make genuine financial sense for people managing high-interest debt, but it requires:

• Qualifying for a balance transfer card based on your credit profile
• Understanding the balance transfer fee (typically a percentage of the transferred amount)
• Paying down the balance before the promotional period ends, otherwise the rate adjusts

Whether a balance transfer is advantageous depends almost entirely on your current interest rate, the new card's terms, and how confidently you can pay off the transferred balance within the promotional window.

Personal Loans

A personal loan from a bank or credit union can be used to pay off credit card debt. The loan funds arrive in your bank account, and you use them to pay the card. Rates on personal loans vary widely based on creditworthiness, but they're often lower than credit card APRs — particularly for borrowers with solid credit histories.

What This Has to Do With Your Credit Profile

Here's where individual circumstances start to diverge significantly.

The variables that matter include your current credit score range, your total revolving utilization across all cards, your income relative to existing debt obligations, and how long your credit accounts have been open. These factors shape what options are realistically available — not just whether you can pay one card with another, but whether any debt management strategy is accessible to you at a given moment.

Someone with a thin credit file or elevated utilization faces a very different set of realistic choices than someone with a long, clean credit history and low balances. The same financial move can be low-cost and straightforward for one person and expensive or unavailable for another.

The Credit Score Angle 🔍

It's also worth noting that attempting to open new credit — whether a balance transfer card or personal loan — to pay off an existing balance will typically trigger a hard inquiry on your credit report. Hard inquiries cause a small, temporary dip in your score. For most people this is minor, but if your score is already sitting near a threshold that affects your approval odds, timing matters.

Your existing Macy's balance also contributes to your credit utilization ratio — the percentage of your available revolving credit currently in use. High utilization is one of the most significant factors affecting credit scores. Paying down that balance, by whatever method, directly improves this ratio.

How all of this math works out — the inquiry impact, the utilization shift, the net cost of any transfer or loan — depends on where your credit profile actually stands right now.