How the simulator works

Everything here is computed from your spending and the card terms we track. Nothing is ranked by what an issuer pays, and nothing you upload leaves your browser.

1. Pay in full first

The first question is whether you pay your statement balance in full. If you don't, interest at typical APRs costs more than any card pays back, so instead of a rewards ranking you get a payoff comparison: staying put versus moving the balance to a 0% intro balance-transfer card, with the transfer fee and the APR after the intro. Interest compounds daily at APR / 365, the way issuers charge it.

2. Your spending, month by month

Statements give a real month-by-month series. We use your most recent 365 days, grouped by calendar month so December stays December. Months with partial data are scaled up, and months with none are filled with your average month. Typed totals are spread evenly over the year.

Each purchase is sorted into one of 19 categories (dining & delivery, groceries, walmart & target, costco & warehouse clubs, gas & ev charging, transit, rideshare & parking, flights, hotels, car rentals, other travel, streaming, drugstores, home improvement, entertainment & events, amazon, other online shopping, phone, internet & cable, gyms & fitness, everything else), first by merchant name rules and then by the category column your bank's export includes. Card networks code purchases by merchant type, which statements don't show, so the rules follow the usual coding: Walmart and Target are superstores and Costco is a warehouse club, and neither counts as a grocery store for most cards. You can correct any merchant before the cards are scored.

Payments, refunds, interest, late fees and annual fees are recognized and kept out of spending. Foreign transaction fee lines are matched to the purchases they were charged on, which tells us how much you spend abroad.

3. Earning, the way issuers apply it

• Caps reset when the issuer resets them. Yearly caps reset each January, quarterly caps each calendar quarter, per-cycle caps each month. Spend above a cap earns the base rate.
• Rotating categories use the issuer's published calendar. Quarters not yet announced are estimated from the same quarter's most recent calendar, and results say so. You can turn activation off if you won't activate.
• Automatic top-category cards pay their bonus on your biggest eligible category each cycle, picked from your own months.
• Travel-portal rates apply only to the share of travel you say you'd book through a card's travel site (none by default).
• Required memberships (Amazon Prime, Costco, Robinhood Gold) count as an annual fee unless your statements show you already pay for them.

4. One card or two

Every card is scored alone. For two-card setups, each purchase goes to whichever card pays more for it, including after one card hits a cap, which is what following "use this card for dining, that one for everything else" amounts to. When a bonus is capped, it goes first to the spending where it beats the other card by the most (5% on Amazon rather than groceries, if your other card already pays well on groceries). Points pool where the issuer lets you: a Freedom card's points are worth the Sapphire value when you hold both, and Capital One cash back can become miles when you hold a Venture card. A pair is shown only if it beats both of its cards alone.

If you tell us which cards you already have, the results start from them: what they pay you together today, and what each other card would add on top, with every purchase on whichever of your cards pays most. That's the honest answer to "is it worth applying?", because a new card only earns where it beats the ones in your wallet.

5. What a point is worth

In cash back mode, points are worth what you get as cash or a statement credit. In travel mode they're worth a conservative transfer-partner value, but only when your cards unlock transfers; otherwise the fixed travel value. You can change every travel value.

Some cards cash out lower than their currency's default (Citi Strata points cash out at 0.75¢ on their own); pooled accounts use the best rate in the set.

6. Welcome offers you can actually reach

A bonus counts only if your own spending covers the minimum within the offer window, starting the month after today. For two cards opened together, the shorter window has to cover its own minimum and the longer window has to cover both. "As high as" offers default to the published maximum, and you can type in the offer you actually see. Issuer rules (Chase's 5/24, Amex's once-per-lifetime and family rules, and the per-card limits Citi, Capital One and Wells Fargo publish) are applied from the cards you tell us you have or had.

7. Measured vs. assumed

Only what your statements prove moves the default ranking. A statement credit counts up to what you actually spent at that merchant in each credit period: a $10 monthly Uber credit with $8 of Uber charges is worth $8 that month. Credits that would need you to change what you buy (luxury hotel collections, specific restaurant programs) aren't counted unless you tick them. With typed totals we can't see merchants, so merchant credits wait for you to tick them.

Perks we can't price from spending, like lounge access, elite status and travel insurance, aren't given a made-up dollar value. They appear in the break-even line instead.

8. Lounges, companion fares and checked bags

These are valued from how you travel, not from a list price. From statements we read your fares by airline, trips where two tickets were bought together the same day (a companion), fee-sized airline charges (bags, seats) and food and drink bought at airports.

• Lounges: the measured value is the airport food and drink you actually bought on days you'd have had access: the airport has one of the card's lounges, you were flying the right airline for airline clubs, and the yearly visit cap isn't used up. At an airport we can't identify, access is counted in proportion to how many large airports have one of the card's lounges. Comfort beyond the food counts only if you put a dollar value on a visit; otherwise it becomes the break-even "per visit" number.
• Companion certificates and passes: one avoided fare per certificate, priced from your own average fare on that airline (domestic-looking fares for domestic certificates), minus what the companion still pays. Renewal certificates start in year two; Alaska's needs its yearly spend. Southwest's Companion Pass counts only in years your simulated card spending, welcome bonus and the card's boost reach the threshold, and the year after while it's valid. Flying alone, it's worth $0.
• Checked bags: the bag-sized charges you actually paid on that airline, or, if you tell us you check bags, a bag each way at the airline's fee for you and a companion.

9. A few questions, only when they matter

The quiz is built from the perk types the cards carry. Anything your statements already show is answered for you. For the rest, we rank the cards twice, once at each end of the possible answers, and ask only if your top three could change. Most people see three to six questions, and every answer stays editable next to the results.

10. The break-even line

Every comparison states the yearly gap and what would have to close it: "The Platinum trails the Reserve by $400 a year. It wins only if its lounge access and elite status are worth more than $400 a year to you." With the lounge visits you'd actually get (departures through airports where its lounges are), that becomes a price per visit. We also solve for the point value that flips the order: "This flips if Amex points are worth more than 1.6¢ each to you."

11. Multiple years

Year one includes the welcome bonus and any first-year fee waiver. Later years use the full fee, anniversary points, and credits until any published end date. Spending is held constant. We don't yet model point devaluation, calendar-year credit timing, or spend-threshold perks; those are next.

12. Filters

Must-haves remove cards before ranking: no foreign transaction fee, a lounge at your home airport, Visa or Mastercard only, an annual fee cap, a welcome bonus you can still get, a self-reported credit range, and no waitlist cards. Cards closed to new applicants are only scored if you already have them. We don't estimate approval odds.

13. How we check the numbers

A suite of automated checks runs on every change and weekly against outside sources, with a number on each. From the latest run (catalog 2026-10-05.2):

• An independent second calculator, written from these rules rather than from the simulator's code, agrees with it to the cent in 100% of 4,200 card-and-spending cases.
• Two-card routing is within $1 a year of the mathematically best split (solved as a linear program) in 100% of 874 random cases.
• Merchant categories: on real card transactions published by the State of Delaware, labeled with the category the card network assigned, we sort 93.1% of dollars correctly and recognize 79.6% of bonus-category spending, from merchant names alone (scored on merchants we didn't tune against). Exports that include the bank's own category do better.
• Payoff math matches Discover's interest calculator (100% of scenarios) and balance transfer calculator (100%) to within $1.
• Earning and point values match Capital One's own calculators (100%) and Amex's points calculator (100%).
• Card data: 100% of annual fees and welcome offers are confirmed by the issuer's live page or an independent offer dataset. Anything unconfirmed goes to a person to check.

Not yet checked: our estimate for a card you hold against what your account says you earned. That needs your statements' rewards summary, which PDF statements usually include, and comes with PDF import.

The spending profiles on comparison pages

• Everyday spender: About $2,000 a month, mostly groceries and errands, one trip a year.
• Balanced: About $3,500 a month with a few trips a year and regular dining out.
• Frequent traveler: About $5,000 a month, heavy on flights, hotels and restaurants, some trips abroad.

Exporting your statements as CSV

Most card sites let you download transactions from the account activity page: look for a "Download" or export icon, pick a date range covering the last 12 months, and choose CSV (or "spreadsheet"). Some issuers limit each download to a shorter range; download a few and add them all, and overlapping transactions are de-duplicated. We read exports from Chase, American Express, Capital One, Citi, Discover, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and Apple Card, and most other CSVs with a date, description and amount column. PDF statements aren't supported yet.

Card data

The catalog covers 35 cards. Every part of a card's terms carries the page it was verified against and the date; seecard data. Cards unverified for 30 days are flagged; at 60 days they leave the rankings until re-checked.

Independence

Rankings come only from the simulation. Every "Apply" link goes to the issuer's own page and earns us nothing today. If we ever add paid links, they'll be labeled next to the link itself, and they won't change the order.