How we compare credit cards

Where every figure comes from, how we check it, what we leave out, and how each list is sorted.

Methodology version 0.1, September 2026. Changes to it are listed here.

Sources

• The issuer's own pages: each card's page and its pricing and terms.
• Card agreements that issuers file with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• The CFPB's Terms of Credit Card Plans survey, for banks and credit unions whose sites don't list terms. It reports each plan's range of rates as the issuer submitted them.
• The prime rate from the Federal Reserve's data (FRED series DPRIME).

How figures are read and checked

Software fetches the documents on a schedule and reads the figures out of them, with language models for the rates-and-fees tables. Each figure is stored with the sentence it came from and the document it's in, and that's what a receipt shows. A figure that can't be matched to its source, or that looks wrong, waits for a person.

What we leave out

• Figures flagged for review, until someone has checked them.
• Figures read from pages we're not yet sure we may use. They wait for legal review.
• Cards without an annual fee we can source. They aren't published.

APR today

Most agreements set the purchase APR as the prime rate plus a margin. We show the rate that gives today, with the math: the prime rate, the date it took effect and the card's margin.

Checked dates and changes

Each card shows when its figures were last checked. The seal is gold within a week, grey within a month, and says "Rechecking" after that.

A change counts, and gets a stamp such as "Annual fee up", only when both values held for at least 3 days. That way a misreading is never reported as a change. Rewording never counts. Changes are listed on what changed.

Lists

Until our scoring method is published, each list is sorted by one measure, named at its top, and none is called "best":

• No annual fee: the lowest purchase APR today. The top 50.
• Sign-up bonuses: cash bonuses by amount. Points and miles are grouped by program, then by size, because different programs' points aren't worth the same.
• 0% intro APR: the longest 0% period of six months or more, then the lowest balance transfer fee. The top 50.
• Cash back: the rate on everything else, which applies to most spending. The top 50.
• Secured: the lowest annual fee, then the lowest APR.
• Student: the lowest purchase APR today.

APR lists leave out cards reporting a purchase APR under 5%. That's almost always an intro rate or a reporting error, and each list says how many it left out. A list needs at least 5 cards to be published. Issuer pages list every card A–Z and don't rank them.

Payment never enters a list: nobody pays us, and the code that sorts can't see which links would pay.