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The story
On September 1, NTT DOCOMO announced it will cut the point reward rate on its “d Card” credit card in half, from the current 1% down to 0.5%, effective for usage from January 2027. At the same time, the company is conditionally ending its free annual fee, introducing a system that charges 1,650 yen if the card goes unused even once in the previous year. Benefits on the premium “d Card PLATINUM” and the “DOCOMO Poikatsu Plan” are also being scaled back. On 5ch, users weighed in with everything from complaints about network quality to subscriber-count trends, debating whether the changes are justified and what they signal about DOCOMO’s management going forward.
NTT DOCOMO announced on September 1 that it is lowering the d Points reward rate on its “d Card” credit card. Starting with usage from January 2027, points earned on regular purchases will change from 1 point per 100 yen spent to 1 point per 200 yen spent, cutting the reward rate in half, from 1% to 0.5%. The currently free annual fee will also become conditionally chargeable: from the second year onward, cardholders who don’t use the card even once in the previous year will be charged 1,650 yen (tax included).
Benefits on the premium “d Card PLATINUM” and the “DOCOMO Poikatsu Plan” pricing plan are also being reduced. For PLATINUM, the reward rate on DOCOMO Hikari and DOCOMO Denki Green charges will be lowered, and the introductory period during which the maximum reward rate applies uniformly to new members will be shortened. Under the Poikatsu Plan, the amount used to calculate d Points earned based on monthly fees will be reduced, cutting the actual points customers receive.
The timing of these changes varies by category. Changes for DOCOMO Denki Green take effect for usage from October 2026; changes for mobile phone service, DOCOMO Hikari, d Card Tsumitate (savings/investment), and the DOCOMO Poikatsu Plan take effect for usage from December 2026. The standard d Card reward rate changes for usage from January 2027. Implementation dates are subject to change, and the revisions apply even to customers already subscribed to or using these services.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Of course an opening-day rate doesn't last forever.
PayPay: "Yeah, figured."
Figured they'd be this kind of company, and yep, called it.
I moved every last yen out of Sumishin SBI Net Bank to another bank in one transfer.
No matter how much you had sitting in a time deposit, once they cut free interbank transfers down to just once a month, it got useless fast.
Ah, isn't it DOCOMO Bank now, though?
SoftBank, au — 100,000 sites
DOCOMO — 50,000 sites
This is dead serious
That's why you can't even get signal in central Tokyo
Wait, seriously? Is NTT just not investing in infrastructure at all?
I'm out at the edge of Tokyo's 23 wards, and DOCOMO's signal is the worst of the bunch.
Sometimes I even lose signal completely indoors.
Back in the day, DOCOMO used to be the one with the best coverage, though.
New National Stadium: 52.8 billion yen
World Cup: 30 billion yen
City banks used to not even bother with average individual customers
MUFG, which bought the National Stadium's naming rights, is still better
Though with rates starting to climb, who knows what happens from here
Wait, you still earn points with iD? Since last month nothing but d Payment earns bonus points anymore, no?
I don't really hate any particular carrier
Been through all of them, currently on Rakuten (´・ω・｀)
I get not wanting to spend money on your phone, or the reverse of that
but "which carrier is which"
honestly makes zero sense to me…
It's not forced — it just gets cheaper if you use it, no?
Yeah, it's 1.2%. Though the Visa/Mastercard version of the Recruit Card
doesn't support tap-to-pay, wish they'd fix that
PayPay's already the undisputed king of QR payments. Rakuten Pay's a distant runner-up, that's settled.
Stop handing out points, start collecting fees — that's basically free money.
Visa tap-to-pay's reward rate is great lol
Huh?
So you're saying Japan's top telecom is running shady dark-pattern practices?
And they've even started a bank, so they're a financial institution too
That's rough
Is the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications just turning a blind eye to this?
Q: An error shows up when I try to close/delete my d Account
A: For customers who don't have a DOCOMO mobile line, closing/deleting a d Account will show an error and fail in the following cases:
– It's set as the points destination for a d Card
– DOCOMO Hikari (fiber) is registered to the d Account (for non-DOCOMO-line holders)
– DOCOMO Denki Green (electricity) is registered to the d Account (for non-DOCOMO-line holders)
– A DOCOMO phone number is registered
https://id.smt.docomo.ne.jp/src/utility/detail_06_10.html
So basically, unless you clear every single one of those conditions, it just stays forever?
Does that make it a better deal?
If you don't use tap-to-pay on your phone, the reward rate drops to 0.5%.
au's Ponta points don't really have anywhere to spend them
If au Market were on par with Rakuten Market or Yahoo Shopping, they'd actually be worth something
About all you can do with Ponta points is spend them at Life supermarkets
or those Lawson trial-exchange coupons
Convert them to au PAY.
The Lawson trial coupons themselves are already pretty bad anyway
at that point it's no different from just buying it at a regular supermarket
If things weren't going badly, they wouldn't be doing this
And the fact that they ARE doing it means…
It's a drop in the bucket and it'll drive customers away too, but hey, they'll probably just get bailed out with a flood of tax money anyway
Seriously, they can do whatever they want, huh
DOCOMO's not going under no matter how bad management gets, they're part of the NTT group. Though their brand image has completely tanked in the sense I described above.
Customer exodus isn't letting up
au (KDDI etc.) topped net subscriber additions for Q1 FY2026 (mobile phone contract counts as of end of June 2026)
Key figures as of end of June 2026:
– All four mobile carriers combined: 233,117,100 lines
– By carrier:
NTT DOCOMO: 91,291,800 (−1,784,600)
au (KDDI etc.): 73,814,300 (+1,053,700)
SoftBank: 57,019,700 (+99,600)
Rakuten Mobile: 10,750,000 (+390,000)
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/39c65760d5577946b491bead07e84e3679783c93
when the baseline everyone expects is 1.0%
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
This revision isn’t limited to the core d Card reward rate — it’s a sweeping overhaul that also touches the d Card PLATINUM benefits for DOCOMO Hikari and DOCOMO Denki Green, plus the point calculation for the DOCOMO Poikatsu Plan tied to monthly fees, with rollout dates staggered by service from October 2026 through January 2027 — an important fact from the original article. Opinions in the thread split between reading the revision as a “sign of financial trouble” versus “part of an industry-wide trend of reward cutbacks,” and posts like #104 backed the latter view by pointing out how rival cards’ Visa tap-to-pay rewards compare favorably. On subscriber numbers, replies cited figures showing DOCOMO with a net loss while au, SoftBank, and Rakuten Mobile posted net gains as of end of June 2026 — worth noting as fact that the timing of the reward-rate cut does coincide with the subscriber decline. That said, whether this is the direct cause of the revision remains speculation within the thread itself, and it’s worth flagging that the figures in this article are quoted information supplied by a 5ch poster.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “DOCOMO’s d Card Reward Rate, 1% → 0.5% (Tap-to-Pay Excluded) — 1,650 Yen Annual Fee If Unused Even Once a Year.”
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