This card has an unusual structure that runs BACKWARDS from every other card here. Groceries earn 2% on the first $6,000 a year and then drop to 1%. Everything else earns 0.5% on the first $6,000 and then RISES to 1% and stays there, uncapped. The two $6,000 counters are tracked separately, and both reset on 1 January rather than your card anniversary. Our model cannot express a rate that goes up, so the base rate is recorded as the 1% most spending actually earns and the grocery cap is set to $6,000. That understates the card slightly for a light spender, which is the direction we would rather be wrong in. Cash back is paid once a year, in January.

RBC headlines "up to 7% cash back for the first 3 months on up to $1,000 in total purchases". The 7% is reachable only on groceries, where a 5% bonus stacks on the 2% entry rate. Everything else reaches 5.5%. RBC publishes no dollar value for the offer, so we have not invented one; the arithmetic caps it around $55 to $70 depending on where you spend.

No travel insurance, no mobile device coverage, no rental car coverage. Purchase security and extended warranty only, with a $50,000 per year limit. RBC publishes "N/A" for the income requirement in its own comparison table, in a column it fills in for its premium cards, so no minimum is genuinely stated. CAUTION: RBC's information box PDF is dated May 2022 and still shows a 19.99% purchase rate against the 20.99% on the live page, and an even older 2017 version shows a different cash advance fee. Every fee above comes from that stale document. The cash back programme terms are dated September 2020. Quebec residents pay 21.99% on cash advances and no over-limit fee.