The best student credit cards

Featured cards

All 7 cards in this ranking, with what each one is actually best at. Tap any card to jump to its row.

1. 1 Capital One Savor Rewards for Students — Best overall for a student cardholder: 3% on groceries, no annual fee — 3.0¢ back per dollar
2. 2 Bank of America Customized Cash Rewards for Students — 2% on groceries, no annual fee — 2.0¢ back per dollar
3. 3 Discover it Student Chrome — 2x on gas, no annual fee — 2.0¢ back per dollar
4. 4 Bank of America Travel Rewards Credit Card for Students — 1.5x on everything else, no annual fee — 1.5¢ back per dollar
5. 5 Bank of America Unlimited Cash Rewards for Students — 1.5% on everything else, no annual fee — 1.5¢ back per dollar
6. 6 Capital One Quicksilver Rewards for Students — 1.5% on everything else, no annual fee — 1.5¢ back per dollar
7. 7 Discover it Student Cash Back — 1x on everything else, no annual fee — 1.0¢ back per dollar

The ranking

What these actually pay on a year of groceries

A rate is a promise about one dollar. This is the same ranking run over 61 real groceries charges totalling $6,509 — 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.

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 strongest printed earn rate — the highest flat rate it actually publishes, base rate included — taken from our maintained database. That is what places a card here, so a card leads on the category it is genuinely built for.
• Conservative point value. That rate is multiplied by our conservative mid-range value for the currency it pays, which is why a hotel card printing a large multiplier can finish below a plain cash-back card. Every point value we use, published →
• Annual fee. Printed against every card and used to break ties. The best fee-free card in this pool is Capital One Savor Rewards for Students at 3.0¢ per dollar. We never net the fee out of the rate for you — whether it is worth paying depends on how much you spend.
• Caps and limits. Where a card's headline rate stops after a spending cap, that cap is on the card's own page and in the relevant category guide. This ranking uses the printed rate, so a heavily capped bonus should be checked against the cap before you act on it.
• Pool and cutoff. 221 open US cards are in our database; 8 of them are student credit cards and qualify. The page publishes the top 7 by real value — the cutoff is #24, so 1 qualifying card 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 card here for you depends on where you actually spend and on approval odds, which we don't model — caps bite, and a high headline rate only pays if your spending lands in that category. The optimizer 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 →