Canada · American Express (Canada) · American Express

American Express Gold Rewards Card

C$250 annual fee · C$100/yr in printed statement credits · 1x on everything else · 2.5% foreign transaction fee

Earn rates · how we got this

Category	Rate	Cap
Travel	2x	uncapped
Gas	2x	uncapped
Groceries	2x	uncapped
Drugstores	2x	uncapped
Everything else	1x	uncapped
Issuer travel portal portal only — pays only if you book through the issuer's own site, so it is excluded from every ranking on this site	3x	uncapped

See more Canada credit cards →

Statement credits — C$100/yr on paper · how we got this

Credit	Value	How it pays
	C$100/annual	annual

Monthly and quarterly credits expire if unused — that's where most of their printed value quietly disappears.

Non-cash perks

MR points transfer to Aeroplan/Avios/Marriott
One free supplementary card
Travel insurance

Does the fee earn out? · how we got this

The C$250 fee minus C$100 in printed credits leaves C$150/yr to earn back through rewards — roughly C$7,500 of travel spending at 2x (valuing Amex Membership Rewards (Canada) at the same mid-range value the optimizer uses). Whether that clears depends on your actual spending.

Who this card is not for

Every point below is a term the issuer prints, read off this card's own row in our database — not an opinion about the card. three things on this card rule out a kind of spender:

Anyone who doesn't spend at the issuer's travel portal. Its largest printed rate, 3x on issuer travel portal, pays only at the issuer's travel portal. Elsewhere in that category the card earns 3x, so the headline number is a loyalty rate rather than a category rate — which is why no ranking on this site counts it.
Anyone who won't work the statement credits. The C$250 fee is argued for by C$100 of printed credits, spread across 1 separate credit. Each one only pays if you were going to spend that way anyway; ignore them and the whole C$250 has to come back through earn rates instead.
Anyone who spends abroad. Every purchase in a foreign currency carries a 2.5% foreign transaction fee. On a card earning 1.0¢ per dollar at the base rate, that fee costs more than the rewards on the same purchase.