Bank of America® Customized Cash Rewards

You choose the 6% category yourself rather than accepting a rotating one, which is a meaningful advantage over Chase Freedom Flex: the rate applies to how you actually spend instead of to whatever the issuer selected for the quarter. Add 2% at grocery stores and wholesale clubs and 1% elsewhere.

The 6% lasts one year. After that the same category pays 3%, which is still competitive — it matches Chase Freedom Unlimited's dining rate and beats every flat-rate card here on the chosen category. But it means the card you signed up for and the card you hold in year two are different products, and the comparison you did at application no longer describes what you own.

Everything outside the chosen category and groceries earns 1%, tied with Chase Freedom Flex for the lowest base rate of any cash-back card in this catalog. That's half of what the flat 2% cards pay on the same spending.

So the card only makes sense if a large share of your spending sits inside one category you can name. If your spending is spread out, the 6% headline is being funded by everything else earning half rate, and the total can easily come out behind a flat 2% card that never asks you to choose anything.

The advertised 6% applies in a category you select, for the first year only; afterwards that category pays 3%. Bank of America is clear about the structure, but the number worth planning around is 3%, because it is the one that lasts.

The choosing itself is the useful part. Unlike a rotating card you are not waiting to see what next quarter brings — you name the category once and it stays until you change it, which you can do monthly.

The chosen category at 3% and the 2% at grocery stores and wholesale clubs draw on the same $2,500 per quarter — roughly $833 a month across all of them combined, not each. Past it, everything falls to 1% until the quarter turns.

At the cap the bonus rates return about $75 a quarter over what a flat 1% would pay. Whether that beats simply holding one of the four uncapped 2% cards in this catalog depends on whether your bonus-category spending actually fills $2,500 a quarter and stops there. Households well above the cap generally do better on a flat rate they never have to think about.

The advertised 6% applies in a category you select, for the first year only; afterwards that category pays 3%. Bank of America is clear about the structure, but the number worth planning around is 3%, because it is the one that lasts.

The choosing itself is the useful part. Unlike a rotating card you are not waiting to see what next quarter brings — you name the category once and it stays until you change it, which you can do monthly.

The chosen category at 3% and the 2% at grocery stores and wholesale clubs draw on the same $2,500 per quarter — roughly $833 a month across all of them combined, not each. Past it, everything falls to 1% until the quarter turns.

At the cap the bonus rates return about $75 a quarter over what a flat 1% would pay. Whether that beats simply holding one of the four uncapped 2% cards in this catalog depends on whether your bonus-category spending actually fills $2,500 a quarter and stops there. Households well above the cap generally do better on a flat rate they never have to think about.