LendingClub Referral Code

Two things worth knowing upfront. This company is not peer-to-peer any more, and the person you refer is not opening a savings account — they are taking on debt.

LendingClub is not a peer-to-peer lender any more. It invented the category, and for fourteen years individuals funded its loans by buying Notes. It stopped opening new retail Notes accounts on 8 October 2020 and retired the Notes platform entirely on 31 December 2020; existing notes were unaffected and continued to be serviced.

The reason was a change of business model: LendingClub acquired Radius Bancorp for $185 million, completing in February 2021, and became a bank. Under a banking framework it was no longer practical to keep offering Notes, so the company now funds loans the way a bank does — from deposits — rather than from individual investors.

That settles which side of the transaction the referral is on: this programme pays you to introduce someone who takes out a loan. Almost every other referral on this site pays you to introduce a customer to a product they buy or an account they open. This one pays when your friend borrows money — specifically, per our record, when they apply for a loan through your link, are approved, and make their first two on-time payments. You each receive a $100 Amazon gift card.

Three consequences follow, and they should shape how you use it. First, only send it to someone who has already decided to borrow. A personal loan is sometimes exactly the right instrument — consolidating expensive credit-card debt at a lower fixed rate is a genuinely sensible use, and the main reason this product exists — but there is a real difference between helping someone who is already shopping for a loan and putting the idea in their head because there is $100 in it for you. The test is simple: were they looking before you mentioned it? Second, your reward depends on their repayment. Two on-time payments must happen before either of you is paid, which is at least an honest trigger, since the lender pays only once the loan is performing — but it does mean you are waiting on a friend's financial behaviour, and if they miss a payment neither of you gets anything and they have a bigger problem than the gift card. Third, it is a gift card, not cash. A single-retailer voucher is worth its face value only if you were going to spend it there anyway, which applies to a $100 card exactly as it does to a $5 one.

The cap is $500 in referral rewards per calendar year, which at $100 each is five referrals, not six. Per our record the programme is open only to current LendingClub customers with an active account, referrals must be new customers, and it is limited to US residents aged 18 or over.

One small artefact is worth recording, since it is an unusually neat trace of corporate history: the app link in our record points at a Play Store listing whose identifier belongs to First Trade Union Bank — the institution that was later renamed Radius Bank and then acquired by LendingClub. A stale link, but a revealing one; it is the acquisition showing through in the plumbing. It is worth checking that any app you are sent to is the one you expect, whoever sent it.

The thing worth more than $100 to the person you refer: judge a personal loan on its APR, not its monthly payment, since a longer term makes any loan look affordable while costing more in total. Ask about the origination fee, which on this kind of lending is commonly deducted from the amount advanced, so borrowing $10,000 can mean receiving less than $10,000 while owing the full sum. Check whether there is a prepayment penalty, and confirm that a rate quote is a soft search that will not itself mark the credit file. Send those questions with the link and they will be worth considerably more than the gift card.