Almost every Canadian credit card adds a fee to anything bought in another currency. It is usually 2.5%, it is charged on top of the exchange rate rather than instead of it, and it is the single easiest saving to calculate on this entire site.
It Is Not Only for Holidays
The fee applies to the currency of the transaction, not to where you are standing. A subscription billed in US dollars from your sofa in Toronto is a foreign currency transaction. So is an order from a website with a .ca domain that settles in US dollars, which is more of them than you would think, and so is a hotel booked through a foreign booking engine.
Two numbers are stacked here and only one of them is disclosed clearly. The network, Visa or Mastercard or American Express, converts at its own rate, and then the issuer adds its fee on top. We record the fee, because the issuer publishes it. We do not estimate the network margin, because no issuer publishes that.
What It Costs
At 2.5%, ten thousand dollars of foreign currency spending costs $250. That is more than the annual fee on almost every card in our database. A two week trip where you put $4,000 on the card costs $100, which is most of a mid tier annual fee for one holiday.
The Cards That Charge Nothing
Of the personal cards we track, five publish a foreign transaction fee of 0%:
- Scotiabank Gold American Express, $120 a year, and our highest rated card overall at 4.7 out of 5.
- Scotiabank Passport Visa Infinite, $150 a year.
- Scotiabank Platinum American Express, $399 a year.
- Wealthsimple Visa Infinite Plus, $240 a year.
- Wealthsimple Visa Infinite Privilege, $240 a year.
Three of those five are Scotiabank, which is not an endorsement of Scotiabank so much as an observation about the rest of the market. The full list, with the fees and ratings side by side, is on our no foreign transaction fee page.
One Thing to Know About the Amex Ones
Two of the five are American Express cards, and American Express acceptance in Canada is narrower than Visa or Mastercard. A card that saves you 2.5% at the merchants that take it saves you nothing at the ones that do not. If a no fee foreign card is for travel, check acceptance where you are actually going, and carry a Visa or Mastercard as well.
What We Will Not Tell You
Sixty eight of the personal cards we track publish a foreign transaction fee. The rest do not publish one at all, and those cards are not on the no fee list. A blank is not a zero anywhere on this site, and assuming otherwise on this particular field would cost somebody real money on a real trip. Where an issuer stays silent, the card page says so plainly rather than filling the gap.
The published fees we do have are not all the same, either. Most are 2.5%, some are 2%, a few are 3% and one is 1.5%. It is worth checking the number rather than assuming the standard.
Compare the whole database on the comparison page, where no foreign transaction fee is one of the filters.
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