Best cards for flights

The short answer

2 of the 12 ranked cards win something here. Each is listed once, with what it wins; the full ranking follows.

1. 1 Best overall for flights · The Platinum Card from American Express — 5x on flights up to $500,000/year, $895 a year — 5.5¢ back per dollar
2. 4 Best for business spending · Sapphire Reserve for Business — 4x on flights, $795 a year — 5.0¢ back per dollar

The ranking

7 more cards can reach up to 5x 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: World of Hyatt Business Card, Chase Freedom Flex, Discover it Balance Transfer, Discover it Cash Back, Discover it Student Cash Back, NHL Discover it, Venmo Credit Card.

Co-brand and portal-only cards — only at their own brand or portal

42 co-brand cards print a flights rate that only pays at their own brand. United Business Card pays 8x at United — worth 10.0¢ per dollar there; at any other airline it earns 1x, or 1.3¢. That is a loyalty rate, not a flights rate, so it is disclosed here rather than ranked as if it paid everywhere.

"Value there" is the brand-locked rate × our conservative point value. "Anywhere else" is what the same card earns on flights spending that is not at that brand — usually its base rate. If most of your flights spending really is with one brand, the app scores that card on your actual charges.

What these actually pay on a year of flights

A rate is a promise about one dollar. This is the same ranking run over 13 real flights charges totalling $4,722 — 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 $24 a year — the effective rate, after caps and point values, runs from 5.00% to 5.50%. 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 flights rate each issuer actually prints in its terms, read from our maintained database — not a promotional headline and not an average. A rate that only pays at one brand or through one portal is not a flights rate and is never ranked here; it is listed separately below the table.
• 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. 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. 3 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. 222 open US cards are in our database; 15 of them print a flat flights rate and qualify. The page publishes the top 12 by real value — the cutoff is #12, so 3 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 flights 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 70 best-card guides → · Best card for a specific store or bill →