RBC · Mastercard
Business card
A free 1% card with a $650 annual ceiling on how much cash back RBC will pay and a single annual payout in January. Fine as a spare card, weak as a main one.
Rates and features verified 2026-08-18Full terms and conditionsHow we research cards
What we like, and what we don’t
Worth having
- No annual fee and one additional card included free
- 2% for the first three statement periods, which is a real if brief head start
- A flat 1% with no categories to track
- Mastercard acceptance for supplier payments
Watch out for
- RBC caps total cash back at $650 a year, so spending past $65,000 earns nothing at all
- The introductory 2% is drawn from the same $650 ceiling rather than added to it
- Cash back is paid once a year in January, so most of what you earn sits with the bank for months
- Only one additional card is allowed, which rules the card out for a team of any size
- RBC requires a personal guarantee
What this card earns
- Everything else
- 1%
- Bonus rates apply up to
- $650 of annual spending after that, the base rate
- Bonus categories at once
- 2 you choose which
The earning fine print
1% on everything, doubled to 2% for the first three statement periods. Read the cap carefully, because it is expressed in dollars of cash back rather than dollars of spend: RBC pays a maximum of $650 a year, and the introductory 2% comes out of that same $650 rather than sitting on top of it. At 1% that ceiling is reached at $65,000 of annual spend, and everything past it earns nothing. Cash back is paid once a year in January, so money earned in February waits eleven months.
Fees and interest rates
- Annual fee
- None
- Employee card
- Free
- Employee cards included
- 1
- Foreign transaction fee
- Not published by the issuer
- Purchase APR
- 19.99%
- Cash advance APR
- 22.99%
Who can get this card
- Personal guarantee required
- Yes you are personally liable for the balance
What the benefits really mean
The $650 figure is a cap on cash back paid, not on spend. Cash back is credited once a year in January. A maximum of one additional card is permitted and it is free. RBC does not publish a foreign transaction fee on the product page, so that field is left empty. A personal guarantee is required.
Our verdict
The $650 ceiling is the whole story. A business putting $10,000 a month through this card earns nothing after the seventh month, which makes it a strictly worse free card than the BMO CashBack Business for anyone with real volume. The single January payout compounds the problem, because cash back earned in February is money RBC holds for eleven months before returning it.
It is not useless. If you spend under about $30,000 a year and you already bank with RBC, a free 1% card with a free second card is perfectly reasonable and the introductory 2% is worth having. Just do not make it the card you push everything through, and if you have more than two people who need a card, look elsewhere immediately.
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Where this came from. rbcroyalbank.com business credit card pages and cardholder agreement, checked 2026-08-18. We take every figure from the issuer’s own pages, never from another comparison site, and we leave a field blank rather than guess at it.