Which Card Should I Use?

Pick a category

Where the numbers come from

Every earning rate is read from the issuer's own page and stored with the date it was checked. Nothing here is copied from another blog's round-up, and nothing is remembered rather than looked up. Where an issuer advertises a combined figure — United's "11 miles per dollar", IHG's "26x" — only the card's own share is counted, because the rest is programme and status earning you get whichever card you hold.

Point values are the other half of the sum, and those are borrowed: the default cents-per-point rates are The Points Guy's published valuations, not ours. The ranking is ours; the valuations are theirs. If you disagree with a number — and you should, for your own redemptions — the figures move when you set your own.

What this will not do

It will not tell you a rate applies when it does not. A card that earns 5x on dining only at partner restaurants is shown beside the answer as a condition, never as the answer, because a number you cannot act on at the till is worse than no number. Categories where too few cards earn anything are left out entirely rather than padded into a page — a ranking of three cards is not a ranking.