How CredSpy ranks credit cards

Two signals decide a card's position, and a short list of penalties can push it down. Both are below, with the exact weights. Nothing about a commercial relationship enters the calculation — if it did, publishing this page would be pointless.

• 60%

  Fit with your answers

  Spend categories you named, fee tolerance, lounge and lifetime-free preferences, and the income the bank asks for. A card that fails a hard preference is pushed below every card that passes it, however rich its rewards look.

• 40%

  Net annual value

  Rewards earned on your stated monthly spends at the bank’s published rates, with monthly reward caps applied and the annual fee subtracted. The number is what is left, not what is earned.

• Banks cannot buy a positionNo issuer pays for placement, and commission rates are not an input to the ranking. Where we earn a commission, the card page says so.
• Every number traces to a published sourceFees, reward rates, caps and eligibility come from the bank’s own terms. Where a card states no rate, we fall back to its base earn rate and label it as such rather than inventing one.
• Changes are logged, not quietly patchedWhen a fee or reward rate changes, both the old and new value are recorded on the change tracker with the date.
• What we deliberately excludeWelcome bonuses, one-off milestone gifts and lounge visit valuations are left out of the score. They are real, but they are one-time or hard to value consistently, and including them would flatter expensive cards.

Think a score is wrong? Tell us which card and why — corrections are published on the card's own page, with the date they were made.