Should I close a credit card after paying it off?
Not necessarily. Closing it removes temptation, which is worth something real. It also reduces your available credit, which in countries with credit scoring can make future borrowing slightly harder. A reasonable middle: keep the account open, but take the card out of your wallet and delete it from saved payment details.
The two things in tension
Temptation. An open card with a limit is money you can spend that you do not have. If the balance took years to clear, leaving that available is a genuine risk, and no amount of resolve changes the fact that it is one click away at eleven at night.
Borrowing capacity. In countries that use credit scoring, closing an account usually reduces your total available credit, which raises the proportion of it you are using. It can also, over time, shorten the average age of your accounts. Both tend to count against you in scoring models.
Neither of these is enormous. But they point in opposite directions, which is why this question has no single answer.
The middle option
For most people the sensible route captures both benefits:
Keep the account open. Remove the card from your life.
Take it out of your wallet. Delete it from browsers, phones, and every subscription and shop that has stored it. Put the physical card somewhere inconvenient — genuinely inconvenient, not a drawer you open daily.
The account stays on your record, doing whatever quiet good it does for future borrowing. The card stops being a payment method you can reach in three seconds. Almost all the temptation lives in the convenience, not in the account’s existence.
Some cards are closed by the lender after long inactivity. A very small recurring charge, paid in full automatically each month, keeps it alive without creating a balance — though only do this if you trust the automatic payment completely.
When to just close it
It has an annual fee you are not getting value from. Paying to keep a card open for a marginal scoring benefit is not worth it.
You know you will use it. If you have cleared and refilled this card before, the account’s effect on a credit score is irrelevant next to the near-certainty of doing it again. Close it.
It has a very high limit relative to your income, and you find that fact stressful. Some lenders will reduce a limit without closing the account, which is a useful middle step.
The debt came with genuine distress. If the account is tangled up with a period you are trying to leave behind, close it. That is a legitimate reason and it outranks a scoring nuance.
The part that varies by country
Credit reporting differs a great deal between countries — what is recorded, for how long, who can see it, and how much closing an account matters. Some systems weigh utilisation heavily; others barely track it. Some show closed accounts for years; others drop them quickly.
So treat the scoring argument above as directional rather than precise. If you are planning a mortgage application in the next year or two, it is worth finding out how it actually works where you live before closing anything.
If no major borrowing is planned, the scoring question matters less than the temptation question — and the temptation question you can answer honestly by yourself.
Related questions
This is covered properly, with worked examples, in The Quiet Fortune, Volume II.