Best cards for cell phone plans

Featured cards

All 5 cards in this ranking, with what each one is actually best at. Tap any card to jump to its row.

1. 1 Chase Ink Business Cash — Best overall for cell phone plans: 5% on cell phone plans up to $25,000/year, no annual fee — 5.0¢ back per dollar
2. 2 Chase Ink Business Preferred — Best for transferable points: 3x on cell phone plans up to $150,000/year, $95 a year — 3.8¢ back per dollar
3. 3 Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express Card — 4x on cell phone plans, $125 a year — 2.8¢ back per dollar
4. 4 Citi® / AAdvantage Business™ World Elite Mastercard® — 2x on cell phone plans, $99 a year — 2.7¢ back per dollar
5. 5 Marriott Bonvoy Bold® Credit Card — Best uncapped no-fee rate: 2x on cell phone plans, no annual fee — 1.4¢ back per dollar

The ranking

8 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: American Express Business Gold Card, Chase Freedom Flex, Discover it Balance Transfer, Discover it Cash Back, Discover it Student Cash Back, NHL Discover it, Max Cash Preferred (Elan), Venmo Credit Card.

Brand-locked cards — only at one merchant or portal

1 card prints a cell phone plans rate that only pays at one merchant or through one portal. It is real money if that is where you shop — and nothing at all anywhere else — so it is listed here rather than ranked as a category rate.

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

What these actually pay on a year of cell phone plans

A rate is a promise about one dollar. This is the same ranking run over 12 real cell phone plans charges totalling $1,248 — 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 $45 a year — the effective rate, after caps and point values, runs from 1.40% to 5.00%. 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 cell phone plans 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 cell phone plans 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. 2 of the 5 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. 221 open US cards are in our database; 5 of them print a flat cell phone plans rate and qualify. All 5 are ranked above — that is under the 12-card cutoff, so nothing was left off.
• 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 cell phone plans 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 →