Best cards for dining

Featured cards

All 12 cards in this ranking, with what each one is actually best at. Tap any card to jump to its row.

1. 1 American Express Gold Card — Best overall for dining: 4x on dining up to $50,000/year, $325 a year — 4.4¢ back per dollar
2. 2 Bank of America Atmos Rewards Summit Visa Infinite — 3x on dining, $395 a year — 4.2¢ back per dollar
3. 3 Aeroplan Card — 3x on dining, $95 a year — 4.0¢ back per dollar
4. 4 U.S. Bank Altitude Go Visa Signature Card — Best with no annual fee: 4x on dining up to $2,000/quarter, no annual fee — 4.0¢ back per dollar
5. 5 Everyday Rewards+ (Elan) — 4x on dining up to $2,000/quarter, no annual fee — 4.0¢ back per dollar
6. 6 Chase Sapphire Preferred — 3x on dining, $95 a year — 3.8¢ back per dollar
7. 7 Chase Sapphire Reserve — 3x on dining, $795 a year — 3.8¢ back per dollar
8. 8 Air France KLM Visa Signature — 3x on dining, $89 a year — 3.6¢ back per dollar
9. 9 Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card — 7x on dining, $550 a year — 3.5¢ back per dollar
10. 10 World of Hyatt Credit Card — 2x on dining, $95 a year — 3.4¢ back per dollar
11. 11 Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express Card — Best for business spending: 4x on dining, $125 a year — 3.4¢ back per dollar
12. 12 Marriott Bonvoy Bevy American Express Card — 4x on dining up to $15,000/year, $250 a year — 3.4¢ back per dollar

The ranking

15 more cards can reach up to 5% here through rotating or pick-your-own categories — powerful, but only in the right quarter or with the right election, so we rank them separately: Bank of America Business Advantage Customized Cash Rewards, Bank of America Customized Cash Rewards, Bank of America Customized Cash Rewards Secured, Bank of America Customized Cash Rewards for Students, World of Hyatt Business Card, Chase Freedom Flex, Citi Strata℠ Card, Discover it Balance Transfer, Discover it Cash Back, Discover it Student Cash Back, NHL Discover it, U.S. Bank Business Leverage Visa Signature Card, U.S. Bank Cash+ Visa Signature Card, Max Cash Preferred (Elan), Venmo Credit Card.

What these actually pay on a year of dining

A rate is a promise about one dollar. This is the same ranking run over 145 real dining charges totalling $4,789 — our sample year — scored one charge at a time by the same engine the app uses on your own statement. Caps, category rules and point values all apply; nothing is annualised or rounded up.

On this spending the gap between top and bottom is $19 a year — the effective rate, after caps and point values, runs from 4.00% to 4.40%. Your own charges are what matter, and the app scores those rather than a sample.

How we rank

One arithmetic rule, applied by code to our maintained card database. There is no editorial pick, no hand-ordering and no sponsored slot.

• Printed earn rate. The dining rate each issuer actually prints in its terms, read from our maintained database — not a promotional headline and not an average.
• Conservative point value. That rate is multiplied by our conservative mid-range value for the currency it pays. It is the step that turns "5x" into cents, and the reason a big multiplier in a weak programme does not win here. Every point value we use, published →
• Annual fee. Printed next to every card and used to break ties — where two cards pay the same, the cheaper one ranks higher. On this page the best fee-charging card needs about $81,250 of dining spending a year before it beats the best free one. We never net the fee out of the rate for you, because whether it is worth paying depends on how much you spend.
• Caps and limits. 4 of the 12 cards here cap this bonus, and the cap is printed in its own column. A capped rate is never treated as if it ran all year.
• Pool and cutoff. 219 open US cards are in our database; 83 of them print a flat dining rate and qualify. The page publishes the top 12 by real value — the cutoff is #12, so 71 qualifying cards did not make it and can be found on the full card list.
• Rotating and pick-your-own categories. Kept out of the headline ranking, because they only pay in the right quarter or with the right election. Issuer-travel-portal-only rates are excluded for the same reason: they pay only if you book through the portal.
• Commission. The ranking code has no access to which cards pay us a commission — the ordering function never reads the affiliate file. Any apply link is attached after the order is already fixed, so it cannot move a card up or down. How that works.

Full methodology, including how each point value is set: how we value points and rank cards →

The honest caveat

The best dining card for you depends on what you actually spend — a high-rate card with a $325 fee loses to a no-fee card below a certain volume, caps bite, and your redemptions may beat or trail our point values. That math is exactly what the optimizer does: it re-scores your real charges against every card here.

Common questions

More guides

Every guide on this site is built by the same code from the same card database, so the numbers on one page mean exactly what they mean on another. Jump sideways:

All 57 best-card guides → · Best card for a specific store or bill →