How We Rate Cards

How We Verify Card Facts

We check card facts — earn rates, fees, credits, and benefits — against the issuer's or program's own published terms, and keep the source and date of each check. A card page shows the date its terms were last checked against the issuer.

When an issuer no longer states a fact, or we can't confirm it, we stop publishing it as fact: the page shows it as unknown rather than guessing. Pages that walk through a number show how we worked it out, so you can check the same sources yourself.

Point Valuations

Most rankings come down to one number: cents of value per dollar spent. For cash back that number is the rate itself. For points and miles, it depends on what a point is worth — so we publish our own estimate per program, in cents per point (cpp).

Each estimate is the median of the published valuations we cite for that program — The Points Guy, NerdWallet, Frequent Miler and others — and it is dated by the oldest of those sources, so an estimate never claims to be fresher than the evidence behind it. A valuation of 1.5 cpp means one point is worth about 1.5 cents when redeemed well, not at the lowest-value cash-out option.

Valuations are estimates, not guarantees. Your redemption value depends on how you actually redeem.

Editorial Policy

Rankings are produced by our scoring model — earn rates, point valuations, credits, and fees — never by commercial relationships. Issuers cannot pay for placement, and whether we have an affiliate relationship with an issuer has no effect on where its cards rank. See About for how the ranking formula works.

Some card pages include an editorial review. Most are written by PointsNav's writers and carry their name, PointsNav, and the date; the rest are written by CardRewards and credited to us. A review never influences a card's score or rank.

Data Freshness

Card terms change without notice, so we treat freshness as a number of its own: card pages show when that card's terms were last checked, and bank offers show the date they were checked against the bank's own page.

Spotted something out of date? Tell us — corrections are the fastest way our data improves.