The Best Rewards Cards For You

We’ve picked the cards that will give you the biggest payback for the way you spend.

- Lisa Gerstner

Choosing a rewards credit card may not seem so rewarding—at first. The market is crowded with contenders vying for space in your wallet, and comparing the card terms and features can easily eat hours of your time. About half of respondents to a TD Bank survey said that shopping for a new card can be overwhelming, or at least annoying. // But the effort is worth it. On a travel rewards card, for example, a 50,000-point sign-up bonus is worth an average of 1.6 round-trip flights, according to personal finance site NerdWallet. And by our estimate, the first-year rewards on everyday spending are worth about $500 or more for some cards. To ease the pain of making a selection, we pored over dozens of the top rewards cards and highlighted the cream of the crop. Then we broke them into categories to help you maximize your payback given your spending habits and desire for simplicity. Cash back is the most popular reward among card users, so we’ve dedicated a section to cashback cards. We’ve also offered up the best bets in travel and everyday spending, including cards with great rebates on groceries, gas and dining— a category in which card issuers have been cranking up rewards in the past couple of years. We named honorable mentions in each category, too; to see the full description, go to kiplinger .com/links/cards19.

Set your strategy.

Rewards card issuers continue to tinker with their offerings, the goal being to lure customers with generous paybacks while keeping their own balance sheets intact. After years of one-upping each other, “a lot of issuers have gotten tired of this arms race,” says Ted Rossman, industry analyst for CreditCards.com. There’s a school of thought in the industry that this cutthroat competition is not sustainable as customers get better at gaming credit card rewards, he adds.