Remember When PayPal Paid You 20% to Shop on Credit? We’re Hoping It Happens Again This Holiday Season

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Last November, PayPal quietly ran one of the most talked-about promotions of the 2025 holiday season: a 20% cash back offer for shoppers who used Pay Later at checkout. With the 2026 holidays approaching, we’re taking a look back at how the deal worked, what our community had to say about it, and why we’re crossing our fingers PayPal brings it back.

What the deal actually was

The offer, first spotted in a Slickdeals thread on November 18, 2025, gave select PayPal account holders 20% cash back when they chose Pay Later at checkout, good through December 8. After that, the rate dropped to 5% through the end of the year.

To claim it, shoppers had to open the Rewards section of their PayPal account, find an offer labeled “20% cash back on Pay Later purchases with PayPal,” and click Save Offer before checking out. The cash back only applied when PayPal’s Pay Later option (specifically the four-installment Pay in 4 plan, which required a 25% down payment and covered purchases between $30 and $1,500) was selected at checkout instead of a standard PayPal payment.

Based on the terms in the deal thread, the reward maxed out at $250, or 25,000 points, on up to $1,250 in spend. On November 26, PayPal tightened the offer to one eligible purchase per customer, after some shoppers had believed multiple purchases might qualify.

How the community reacted

The thread pulled in more than 5,000 comments, which is almost unheard of on Slickdeals. It’s easy to see why, too. A 20% return on holiday spending is hard to ignore. Plenty of that discussion was shoppers working out the fine print in real time.

User dealjumpr broke down the Pay in 4 structure for anyone unfamiliar with it, while Eric1285’s read on the deal shifted mid-thread, from assuming the $1,250 cap could be split across multiple purchases to concluding it was “total spend of $1250, but can be spread across multiple purchases” within that one-purchase limit.

Not every comment was celebratory. Cpshell1 warned that AliExpress transactions were being processed as cash advances by some credit card issuers, meaning that a card linked to PayPal for a Pay Later purchase could rack up a cash advance fee plus interest as high as 28% APR, a costly surprise for anyone stacking savings without checking their card’s terms first. Others flagged that Chase cards weren’t eligible for the offer at all.

Retailer-specific workarounds became a recurring theme. seantan2001 explained how to get Pay in 4 to show up on eBay: remove PayPal from eBay’s saved payment settings first so checkout redirects to PayPal directly, where Pay in 4 becomes an option. Shoppers trying the deal at Walmart ran into a similar snag and found they needed to remove PayPal from their saved payment methods and uncheck “Remember PayPal” at checkout for Pay Later to appear.

As with most YMMV offers, availability was inconsistent. Several shoppers reported seeing nothing in their Rewards section at all, though at least one found the offer appeared only after logging out of their PayPal account and back in.

Personally, I didn’t have any issues using it on the Dick’s Sporting Goods website to grab a new golf bag that has gotten good mileage this year.

Why we’re hoping it comes back

A straightforward 20% cash back rate on holiday purchases, even capped at $250, is a rare offer, and it’s the kind of promotion our community remembers. With the 2026 holiday season on the horizon, we’ll be watching PayPal’s Rewards page closely for any sign that this one (or something like it) returns. If it does, expect the same kind of scrutiny from Slickdeals shoppers on eligibility, retailer quirks, and whether it’s worth saving that Pay in 4 plan for one big purchase instead of several smaller ones.

In the meantime, it’s worth checking your own PayPal Rewards section now and then. Offers like this one tend to show up with little warning, and last year’s deal proved that a few minutes of reading the fine print can be the difference between a $250 windfall and an unexpected cash advance fee.