Debt and credit · Calculator

Credit card
comparison calculator.

Enter your monthly spending by category. The tool compares your total annual cashback at 1%, at a single 2% flat card, and at a no-fee category stack, then shows an editorial three-card travel stack for context (a recommendation, not a computed optimum). All math runs in your browser. Terms and bonuses change constantly, use this for comparison only.

Full strategy: How to Get the Most Out of Your Credit Cards

The question it answersWhich credit card or card combo earns me the most cashback?

Rules: United States. Privacy: runs in your browser. What you enter stays on your device unless you copy a share link, which puts your inputs in the link.

Rates used. Flat card: 2% on everything. No-fee stack: 3% groceries and dining (Capital One Savor, superstores like Walmart and Target excluded), 5% Amazon with Prime or 3% without, 2% gas, travel and everything else. Travel stack: 3% dining and gas, 2% everything else, minus a $95 fee. Card terms change frequently, verify current offers before applying.

Reminder: none of this math works if you carry a balance. 22% APRAnnual Percentage Rate (APR)The yearly cost of borrowing money, shown as a percentage.Full definition interest cancels every reward immediately. Pay in full every month, or get to zero first.

What this tool assumes
  • Annual cashback = your monthly spending in each category × 12 × that card's rate. Points count at 1 cent each.
  • Groceries means supermarkets: Capital One Savor's 3% excludes superstores like Walmart and Target.
  • The Amazon category is Amazon.com and Whole Foods only. Other online stores earn the 2% base rate, so enter them under everything else.
  • Answering Yes to Prime assumes you already pay for the membership for other reasons, so its cost is not subtracted. Answering No uses the no-fee Amazon Visa at 3%.
  • No sign-up bonuses, spending caps, carried balances or point transfers. The travel stack subtracts its $95 fee and does not add the hotel credit.
  • The no-fee stack is highlighted when it beats the flat 2% card by more than $50 a year, comparing the whole-dollar figures shown. Otherwise the flat 2% card is highlighted, with a modest-spending note when monthly spending is under $1,500. With every slider at $0, nothing is highlighted and the tool asks for your spending instead of giving a recommendation or a gain over 1%.
  • A shared link or saved value a slider cannot hold is replaced and flagged above the rates: a number outside the slider's range or step snaps to the nearest allowed value, and anything that is not a number, or a Prime answer other than Yes or No, falls back to the default. Spaces around a number (a + in a link reads as a space) are ignored.

Not financial advice. Card rates and bonuses change. Verify current offers before applying.

HOW THIS IS CALCULATED

This tool runs entirely in your browser: no data is sent to any server. Card earn rates are fixed numbers in the page code; the issuer pages cited below were checked on the date shown.

  • Annual rewards for each scenario = the sum over categories of monthly spend × 12 × that category's rate.
  • 1% baseline: every category at 1%. Flat card: every category at 2%, the no-annual-fee rate Fidelity Visa, Citi Double Cash and Wells Fargo Active Cash advertise[1][2][3]. Fidelity's 2% applies when rewards are deposited to a Fidelity account[1].
  • No-fee stack: groceries and dining 3% (Capital One Savor, $0 annual fee, grocery rate excludes superstores like Walmart and Target[4]); Amazon 5% if you answer Yes to Prime (Prime Visa, which requires an eligible Prime membership) or 3% if you answer No (Amazon Visa, no Prime needed)[5]; gas, travel and everything else 2% (Fidelity Visa).
  • Travel stack: dining 3%, gas 3%, everything else 2%, minus the $95 Chase Sapphire Preferred fee. Chase lists 3x dining, 3x gas and EV charging, 2x other travel and up to $100 a year in hotel credits through Chase Travel[6]; Freedom Unlimited lists 3% dining and drugstores and 1.5% on everything else[7]. Points count at 1 cent each; the hotel credit is not added.
  • Highlighted result: the no-fee stack if its rounded total beats the rounded flat 2% total by more than $50 a year, else flat 2%. When flat 2% is highlighted and monthly spend is under $1,500, the note calls the spend level modest. The travel stack is never highlighted. At $0 total spend nothing is highlighted and a prompt to enter spending replaces the recommendation.
  • Gain over 1% = highlighted result minus the 1% baseline, both rounded to whole dollars, also shown × 30 and as 30 yearly deposits growing at an assumed 8%: gain × (1.08^30 minus 1) ÷ 0.08. Not shown at $0 total spend.

Not modeled: sign-up bonuses, the Prime membership fee (the 5% option assumes you already pay for Prime; answer No to see the no-membership 3% card), category spending caps, interest on a carried balance, and point transfers. Verify the methodology or inspect the source code in your browser's dev tools.

Where to go from here

Read next

Credit Card Strategy

The 2% no-fee baseline, when category and travel cards earn their fees, the protections most people never use, and the traps.

Explore further
  • Debit vs CreditCredit beats debit on fraud liability, rewards, and credit building, but only if you pay in full monthly.
  • Cashback CompounderProjects the future value of auto-invested credit card cashback based on monthly spend and return assumption.

Sources

Bracketed numbers in the text link to these sources. Figures, rates and rules change: check each source’s date before acting on it.

  1. Fidelity, Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature Card. Checked 2026-09-26. ↩
  2. Citi, Citi Double Cash Credit Card. Checked 2026-09-26. ↩
  3. Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo Active Cash Card. Checked 2026-09-26. ↩
  4. Capital One, Savor Rewards: Cash Back on Dining & Grocery Stores. Checked 2026-09-26. ↩
  5. Chase, Prime Visa Credit Card. Checked 2026-09-26. ↩
  6. Chase, Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card. Checked 2026-09-26. ↩
  7. Chase, Chase Freedom Unlimited Credit Card. Checked 2026-09-26. ↩

Calculators are educational estimates, not financial advice. Disclosures · How pages are reviewed