Benchmark Money is a Canadian personal finance site. It exists because the honest answer to “which credit card should I get” depends on how you actually spend, and almost nothing online is built to answer it that way.
What is here
155 Canadian credit cards from 28 issuers, each with its own page carrying the fees, the rates, the earn rates and their caps, the eligibility terms and a written verdict. 98 are personal cards and 57 are business cards, and the two never rank against each other. Everything was verified against issuer sources on 18 August 2026.
Alongside the cards there are calculators for the decisions that cost the most money: a mortgage payment and stress test, RRSP against TFSA, rent against buy, a line of credit, and two for paying debt down. They use published Canadian rules rather than generic arithmetic, and where a rule has a date attached, the calculator says when it was last checked.
Who it is for
People making an ordinary Canadian money decision who want the arithmetic done properly and shown to them. Somebody working out whether an annual fee pays for itself on the way they actually shop. A business owner who needs to know whether a card in the company name still puts their own credit on the line. Anybody who has read three comparison pages and noticed they all rank the same cards in the same order and none of them says why.
It is written for Canada specifically. Foreign transaction fees, the mortgage stress test, RRSP and TFSA room, and which programmes are worth anything here are all different from the American answer, and the American answer is what most of the internet gives you.
How this is different from a rankings page
- You put in your own spending. The comparison opens with an empty form rather than a pre filled household we invented, because a ranking built from one real figure and eight made up ones is worse than no ranking.
- Missing data stays missing. No blank is quietly rounded to zero anywhere on this site.
- The method is written down. How ratings are built, how points are valued and what we refuse to publish are all on one page you can check us against.
- The verdicts are opinions and read like it. Several cards from major banks are rated poorly and told to be avoided, including cards that pay us.
How it is built
Every card is a record in a database rather than a paragraph somebody typed, which is why a correction to one figure updates every page that figure appears on and moves the verification date with it. It is also what makes the missing data rule enforceable: a blank field is a blank field everywhere, all the way to the page, rather than something that quietly becomes a zero in one place and not another.
How the site makes money
Commission on some card approvals, disclosed on the card page next to the button. It does not affect ratings, ordering, or which cards are listed. The reason to believe that is not that we said it: it is that the ranking rules are published, so an ordering bought rather than earned would be visible.
What this site is not
It is not a broker, it does not take applications, and it never sees your financial details. The spending figures you type into the comparison stay in your browser. It is not financial advice either: it publishes what the terms say and what we think of them, and a recommendation for your particular situation is a different thing that requires a licence we do not hold.
Getting in touch
Corrections, questions and press are welcome through the contact page. A correction backed by a link to the issuer’s own page gets fixed fastest.
Benchmark Money publishes information, not advice. Nothing here is a recommendation tailored to your situation, and we are not licensed to give one.