Best cards that earn IHG points

The short answer

3 of the 4 ranked cards win something here. Each is listed once, with what it wins; the full ranking follows.

1. 1 Best overall for earning IHG points · IHG One Rewards Premier Select Credit Card — 6x on travel, $350 a year — 3.0¢ back per dollar
2. 3 Best for business spending · IHG One Rewards Business Credit Card — 5x on flights, $200 a year — 2.5¢ back per dollar
3. 4 Best with no annual fee · IHG One Rewards Credit Card — 3x on dining, no annual fee — 1.5¢ back per dollar

Ranked by real value, not multiplier

Headline rate is each card's best bonus rate that pays anywhere in its category. A rate that only pays at one brand or through one portal (14x at Hilton, 8x on United fares, 5x via Chase Travel) is printed in grey and excluded from the ranking — it is a loyalty rate, not a category rate. Real value is the headline rate × 0.50¢.

Co-brand rates — only at their own brand

4 brand-locked rates across these cards. Each is real if that is where you spend — IHG One Rewards Premier Select Credit Card really does pay 12x at IHG, worth 6.0¢ per dollar at our 0.50¢ value — and pays nothing extra anywhere else, which is why none of them set a card's headline rate above.

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 these cards finish within $0 of each other, which is worth knowing: the ranking above is real but the difference is not material at this level of spend. Your own charges are what matter, and the app scores those rather than a sample.

What IHG points are worth

We value IHG points at a conservative 0.50¢ per point — the same number the optimizer scores your charges with, and deliberately not the best-case figure a points blog would quote. IHG points are spent inside one hotel group. The value swings hard with the property you book. Below a penny, which means a big multiplier in IHG points can lose outright to a plain 2% cash-back card.

Full IHG points valuation and methodology →

Which one should you carry?

On paper IHG One Rewards Premier Select Credit Card earns the most per dollar at its headline rate, but it charges $350 a year — money you have to earn back before the higher rate is worth anything. The best no-fee option is IHG One Rewards Credit Card at 1.5¢ per dollar. A headline rate only pays on the category it names, so the card that earns you the most IHG points is the one whose bonus categories match your actual spending — which is the whole reason we built the optimizer instead of a top-ten list.

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. Each card's best non-portal bonus rate — its headline rate — as printed by the issuer. Where a card has no bonus category, its base rate is used instead, and the table says which.
• Conservative point value. Every rate is multiplied by our conservative 0.50¢ value for IHG points, the same number the optimizer scores real spending with. Because every card here earns the same currency, that value cannot change the order — it sets the scale, and it is what lets you compare this page against a guide for a different currency. Every point value we use, published →
• Annual fee. Printed against every card and used to break ties. The best fee-free earner is IHG One Rewards Credit Card at 1.5¢ per dollar.
• Caps and limits. Where a headline rate stops after a spending cap, the cap is on the card's own page. Check it before treating a high rate as your everyday rate.
• Pool and cutoff. 222 open US cards are in our database; 4 of them pay out in IHG points and qualify. All 4 are ranked above; there is no cutoff on this page.
• 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 →

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 →