We Read the Rewards Terms on All 41 Cards We Track. The Caps Are the Story

Six per cent on groceries beats two per cent on everything. That is true right up to the moment you find the cap, and after that it depends entirely on what you buy and how much of it.

We spent two days reading the rewards terms on every one of the 41 credit cards in our lineup, on each issuer's own page rather than on a comparison site, and recording them as structured data: the rate, the category, the cap, the period the cap runs over, and whether the cap is shared with other categories on the same card. That last field turns out to matter more than almost anything else.

Bank of America's Customized Cash Rewards is the clearest case of a headline doing work the terms do not support. The card is advertised at 6% cash back in a category you choose. The 6% is a first-year bonus; the rate that stays is 3%. And the cap is shared: the choice category and the automatic 2% on groceries and wholesale clubs draw on a combined $2,500 each quarter, after which both fall to 1%.

U.S. Bank's Cash+ pays 5% in two categories you pick, on the first $2,000 of combined spending each quarter — and you have to activate the categories every quarter. The bank is upfront about what happens if you forget: everything still earns 1%.

PNC Cash Rewards has the only annual cap we found. Its 4% on gas, 3% on dining and 2% on groceries all share one $8,000-a-year bucket. Spend it in July and the rest of the year pays 1% on everything until your anniversary.

Six cards in our lineup pay no rewards at all: Chase Slate, Citi Simplicity, Citi Diamond Preferred, Wells Fargo Reflect, Capital One Platinum, PNC Core and BankAmericard. That is not a gap in our data — Citi states it on both product pages, in those words, and the BankAmericard product page has no rewards section at any point.

These are balance-transfer and credit-building cards, and a rewards rate would be beside the point on all of them. We record the absence as a verified fact rather than as a blank, because a blank would mean we had not checked.

Truist's Enjoy Cash is the only card in our lineup with two different rewards programmes, and you pick one when you apply. Option one is 3% on gas and 2% on groceries and utilities, with the $1,000-a-month shared cap. Option two is a flat 1.5% on everything with no limit.

The bank's own wording is blunt about it: you choose the rewards type when you apply, you just cannot change it later. Which one is better depends entirely on your own spending — and it is not close in either direction. Someone spending $100 a month on fuel is better off with the categories; someone who barely drives is better off with the flat rate.

Structured rates are only useful if something uses them, so the same work produced a calculator. You put in what you spend in a month, by category, and it works out what each card in our lineup would return over a year with the annual fee already subtracted — caps applied, shared caps shared, and the better of Truist's two structures picked for your numbers.

Three things it deliberately leaves out, because putting them in is how these calculators flatter cards. It ignores sign-up bonuses, which are one-off and change constantly. It ignores the higher rate you get by booking through an issuer's own travel portal, because we have no idea whether you would. And it ignores rotating quarterly categories, because nobody knows what they will be. Where an exclusion makes a card look worse than it is, the card says so in its own row.

It also refuses to convert points into dollars. Cash back is shown in dollars and points are shown as points, in two separate tables, because deciding what a Chase point is worth means deciding how you would redeem it — and any single number we picked would be our opinion wearing the costume of a figure.