What happens if you overpay your credit card?

It's easy to accidentally overpay your credit card. Card issuers often don't reflect a new balance after payment until it goes through, so you might pay twice by mistake. Or you might have autopay but still schedule a payment manually. Whatever the reason, overpayment results in a negative balance on your card — and you have a couple of options of how to go about it.

CNBC Select explains what you can do if you overpay your credit card, what the consequences may be and how to avoid a negative balance.

• What to do if you overpay your credit card
• Does overpaying your credit card affect your credit?
• How to avoid a negative credit card balance
• Bottom line

If you find yourself with a negative credit card balance, you typically have two ways to deal with it:

• Wait it out. There's no penalty for overpaying your credit card. If the negative balance isn't significant and you use the card regularly, you can just spend the statement credit on purchases. Once you've spent it, you'll be using your regular credit line again.
• Request a refund. If you overpaid by a large amount, you might want to get the money back. The process of requesting a refund for overpayment varies by issuer, but you can typically complete it online. When the issuer receives your request, they have seven business days to send you the funds. Note that even if you don't ask for a refund, the issuer will attempt to give you one if there's any remaining negative balance on your card for more than six months.

Fortunately, overpaying your credit card won't hurt your credit score.

You might know that carrying a balance on your credit card affects your credit utilization ratio — or how much of your credit line you're using. And if you're using more than 30%, your credit score can take a hit.

A negative balance on your card obviously won't increase your credit utilization ratio, but it won't help it either. Even if you had a negative balance of a million dollars on your card (to use an extreme example), your utilization can't get lower than 0%, so there's no benefit to carrying a negative balance.

Overpaying a credit card can be an inconvenience. If you want to avoid any errors in paying your card bills, there are a few strategies you can try.

Check for recent payments

Some credit card issuers make it easy to see if you've recently made a payment. If you have a card such as the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, tracking your payments should be simple. While Chase typically doesn't update your current balance right away, it displays the most recently schedule payment in the card details when you check the app. You can also tap "View payment activity" under the card details to see all your recent payments and whether they have gone through.

With a credit card like the Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card (see rates and fees), all you need to do is check the issuer's app. Capital One shows your scheduled payments on top of the recent transactions section and often updates your available credit almost immediately after you make a payment. This makes it easy to see how much credit you have available — and how much you still owe.

If your issuer doesn't make this information as easy to find, you can always go and check your transactions as your payment will also be displayed here.

Set up autopay

Perhaps the easiest way to avoid overpayment is to "set it and forget it" by signing up for autopay. With this feature, payments will be made automatically and you can opt to pay the entire balance each month. Just don't forget you have it in place or you risk ending up with a negative balance by scheduling an extra payment manually.

Sign up for account alerts

Autopay isn't for everyone. If you'd rather control how much you pay and when you make the payment, it's up to you to monitor your credit card balances and due dates. Luckily, your issuer can still help you with that task if you set up account alerts. You'll get credit card notifications about your balance, payments due and more, depending on what you opt into. Usually, you can set up alerts online or through the credit card app when you sign in to your account.

Overpaying your card is an easy mistake to make. Fortunately, most of the time, it's only a minor inconvenience and shouldn't lead to any negative consequences. Plus, you can always request to get your money back. That said, try not to overpay too much to avoid waiting for a large sum to return to your checking account — or even having your credit card locked down due to suspicious activity.

At CNBC Select, our mission is to provide our readers with high-quality service journalism and comprehensive consumer advice so they can make informed decisions with their money. Every credit card guide is based on rigorous reporting by our team of expert writers and editors with extensive knowledge of credit card products. While CNBC Select earns a commission from affiliate partners on many offers and links, we create all our content without input from our commercial team or any outside third parties, and we pride ourselves on our journalistic standards and ethics.

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