The direct answer is no. Log into your card account, try to add another credit card as a payment method, and it won’t be accepted. Payments have to come from a bank account, full stop. There’s no setting, no workaround inside the app, no issuer that quietly allows it.
But the question behind the question is usually reasonable: can I move this balance somewhere cheaper? That you can do, through two mechanisms with very different price tags, and the gap between them is bigger than most people expect.
Route 1 — Balance transfer (the sanctioned version)
This is the product built for exactly this purpose. You apply to a new card, tell it which balance to take over, and the new issuer pays off the old card directly. The debt moves from one account to another; you never touch the money.
What it costs. Typically a one-time transfer fee of a few percent of the amount moved, commonly cited in the region of 3%–5%, charged up front and added to the new balance. Here’s the part that catches people out: the CFPB is explicit that a card issuer is permitted to charge this fee even on a zero percent promotional offer. “0% APR” describes the interest rate, not the transfer fee, and the two are priced separately.
What it can save. More than 99% of balance transfer offers now carry a promotional 0% APR, typically running somewhere between six and 21 months depending on the card and your credit profile. Against an average card rate of 20.94%, a window like that is worth real money, but only if you use it to actually repay the balance rather than to relax because the interest stopped for a while.
Where it goes wrong. The reversion rate. When the promotional period ends, whatever balance is left moves to the card’s standard rate, which is frequently no better than the card you transferred away from. People transfer, feel the relief of 0%, pay the minimum for ten months, and land back in the same position minus the transfer fee they paid to get there.
Two rules make it actually work. Diarise the end date the day you open the account, not “sometime next year” — an actual date. And divide the balance by the number of promotional months: that quotient, not the minimum payment, is what you should be paying every month if the goal is to be clear before the rate reverts.
Worked through with round numbers: a $5,000 balance moved with a 4% fee costs $200 up front, added to the new balance, so you’re really paying down $5,200. On an 18-month 0% window (comfortably inside the CFPB’s typical 6–21 month range), clearing that before the rate reverts means paying about $289 a month. Compare that to leaving the same $5,000 on a card charging 20.94% and paying only the minimum: the interest alone would run well past what the transfer fee cost, and the balance barely moves. The fee is real money, but it’s a fraction of what a year-plus of interest at the standard rate would have cost instead.
| Balance transfer | Cash advance | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical fee | ~3%–5% of amount moved | Greater of ~$10 or ~5% of amount |
| Promotional rate | 0% APR common, 6–21 months | None (interest starts immediately) |
| Grace period | Standard grace period applies once transferred | None, at any point |
| New credit check | Yes, if opening a new card | No, uses your existing limit |
Route 2 — Cash advance (the expensive one)
Withdraw cash on card A, deposit it, pay card B. It works, mechanically, and it’s the worst option on this page by a wide margin.
The CFPB’s own data on this is blunt. Most major issuers charge the greater of a flat minimum (commonly around $10) or roughly 5% of the amount withdrawn, so a small cash advance can cost proportionally far more than a large one. There’s no grace period at all: unlike a purchase, where you can avoid interest entirely by paying the statement in full, a cash advance starts accruing interest from the moment you take it, every single day it’s outstanding. And the rate itself is typically much higher than your purchase APR: a cash advance APR around 30% is common, well above the roughly 21% average purchase rate cards charge generally.
Put a number on it: a $400 cash advance at a 30% APR generates real interest from day one, on top of the upfront fee. You’re paying twice, immediately, for the same transaction that a balance transfer would have handled once, later, and at a fraction of the cost.
There’s a narrow legitimate case: a genuine short-term timing problem where the alternative is a missed payment, and you can repay within days rather than months. Payment history is 35% of a credit score and a missed payment is expensive in ways that outlast the interest, so occasionally the least-bad option really is the cash advance. As a general strategy for managing debt, it isn’t one, and treating it like a normal tool is how a temporary problem becomes an expensive habit.
What neither route does
Neither reduces what you owe. Moving a balance changes its price, not its size. Worth saying plainly, because the psychological relief of a cleared card can feel like progress when it isn’t one.
The only things that actually reduce a balance are repayment and settlement, and settlement carries its own costs worth understanding before you go looking for it as a shortcut.
The effect on your credit score
A balance transfer opens a new account: a hard inquiry, a slightly lower average account age, both individually small. It also adds available credit, and if you keep the old card open your overall utilisation may actually fall, which helps, since amounts owed is 30% of a FICO score, the second-biggest factor after payment history.
Keep the old card open, unused, once the transfer clears. Closing it removes its limit from your available credit and pushes utilisation right back up, which undoes much of what the transfer bought you.
A cash advance doesn’t open a new account, so there’s no inquiry. It does raise the balance on card A immediately, including the fee, which pushes that card’s own utilisation up the moment you take it. And because it happens instantly rather than over a billing cycle, it can spike your reported utilisation right before you need your score to look its best, such as ahead of a mortgage or auto loan application.
Neither route is inherently damaging to your score the way a missed payment is. The mechanics above are about how each shows up, not a verdict that either one is bad for your file. A balance transfer used well (cleared inside the window, old card kept open) can leave your score modestly better off than where it started, purely through the utilisation effect.
A quick gut-check before you transfer
Three questions worth answering honestly before you apply for a transfer card, because the product only helps if the answers line up:
- Can you realistically clear the balance inside the promotional window, at the divide-by-months payment, not just the minimum? If the honest answer is no, you’re mainly buying time, not saving money.
- Will you keep the old card open afterward, unused, rather than closing it? Closing it undoes part of the utilisation benefit the transfer was supposed to give you.
- Is the new spending habit actually different, or will the freed-up limit on the old card just fill back up? A transfer that clears one card while the same spending pattern refills it isn’t progress, it’s a reset.
What to actually do, in order
If the goal is a lower rate on the same debt, here’s the honest ranking, cheapest and least disruptive first:
- Ask your current issuer for a rate reduction. Free, takes about twenty minutes on the phone, and it improves every remaining month without opening a new account or triggering an inquiry. Genuinely underused: issuers would rather reduce your rate than lose the balance to a competitor’s transfer offer, and simply asking works more often than most people expect.
- Balance transfer, if you can realistically clear the balance inside the promotional window once you’ve counted the fee against the interest saved. How to pay off credit card debt covers building the actual payoff plan once the balance has landed on the new card, and it’s worth reading before you apply, not after.
- A personal loan, if the balance is large enough that you want a fixed end date rather than an open-ended card, the gap between card and personal loan rates is often worth capturing, and a loan removes the temptation to keep spending on the card you just paid off, since there’s no revolving limit to refill.
- Cash advance. Only for a genuine short-term emergency, repaid within days, never as a standing plan, and never as the first thing you reach for simply because it’s the fastest to access.
None of this changes what you actually owe. Only repayment or settlement does that. If even the minimums are unaffordable right now, start here instead of shuffling balances between cards, and if you’re comparing which payoff method fits your situation generally, avalanche vs snowball on cards lays out the two standard approaches.
Otherwise: ask for the rate cut first. It costs nothing to ask, and it beats every workaround on this page before you’ve even filled out an application. The card debt guide covers the rest of what’s worth checking before you commit to any of these.