American Express
Best for food and drink
Five points a dollar on restaurants, bars, coffee and groceries is the highest food earn rate in Canada, and Membership Rewards transfer to Aeroplan. Worth it if you eat out; not if you do not.
Rates and features verified 2026-08-18Full terms and conditions
What we like, and what we don’t
Worth having
- 5x on restaurants, bars, coffee shops, food delivery and standalone grocery stores
- Membership Rewards transfer to Aeroplan and other partners, which is where the value is
- 3x on eligible streaming, 2x on gas and transit
- Supplementary cards are free
- $5,000,000 travel medical, and it covers 15 days
Watch out for
- The fee is billed monthly at $15.99, which is $191.88 a year and easy to underestimate
- The 5x rate stops after $2,500 of spending each month and resets on the 1st
- American Express publishes no foreign transaction fee at all, so we cannot tell you what one costs
- No trip cancellation or trip interruption coverage
- The welcome bonus is a twelve-month drip. Miss $750 in any month and that month is gone for good
- Its value depends entirely on you actually transferring points to airlines. Cash out instead and it is worth roughly half
What this card earns
- Groceries
- 5x
- Gas
- 2x
- Dining and restaurants
- 5x
- Recurring bills and subscriptions
- 3x
- Transit
- 2x
- Entertainment
- 3x
- Everything else
- 1x
- Bonus rates apply up to
- $30,000 of annual spending after that, the base rate
- What we value a point at
- 2¢
The earning fine print
FEE IS BILLED MONTHLY at $15.99, which Amex itself annualises to $191.88. Quebec residents are billed the $191.88 once a year instead. The 5x rate is capped at $2,500 of net purchases PER MONTH combined across restaurants, quick-service, coffee shops, bars, stand-alone grocery stores and food delivery. The cap resets on the 1st of each month, and $30,000 is this site's annualisation, not an Amex figure. The 3x rate applies only to eligible streaming subscriptions, not to recurring bills generally. Travel and drugstore are not bonus categories and earn 1x.
The welcome offer
- Welcome bonus
- 15,000 points after you spend $9,000, within 12 months
What the offer actually requires
The welcome bonus is a 12-month drip, not a lump sum: 1,250 points for each monthly billing period in which at least $750 of net purchases POST. Missing a month forfeits that month's 1,250 points permanently. The $9,000 spend figure is 12 x $750. Not available to current or former Cobalt cardmembers.
Fees and interest rates
- Annual fee
- $191.88
- Additional card
- Free
- Foreign transaction fee
- Not published by the issuer
- Purchase APR
- 21.99%
- Cash advance APR
- 21.99%
Who can get this card
- Minimum personal income
- Not published by the issuer
Insurance and benefits
- Travel medical
- $5,000,000 first 15 days of a trip, age 64 and under
- Flight delay
- $500
- Baggage delay
- $500
- Mobile device
- $1,000
- Rental car damage waiver
- Included
- Purchase protection
- Included
- Extended warranty
- Included
What the benefits really mean
FOREIGN TRANSACTION FEE IS DELIBERATELY BLANK. The Cobalt cardmember agreement says only that converted amounts are increased "by a single conversion commission as specified in the information box", and Amex Canada does not publish that information box online. The widely quoted 2.5% is not an issuer-published figure for this card, so do not backfill it. Cash advance fee, NSF fee and balance transfer terms are blank for the same reason. No trip cancellation or interruption coverage. Amex publishes no income or credit score requirement.
Our verdict
The Cobalt tops our ranking, but read how it got there. We value Membership Rewards at two cents because they transfer to Aeroplan, and that assumption is doing a lot of the work. Switch our cash-out toggle on and this card falls behind the Scotiabank Gold. If you are not going to learn award bookings, do not buy this card on the strength of a number that assumes you will.
If you do eat out regularly and you will transfer points, nothing else in Canada earns this fast on food. Just budget for it as $16 a month rather than a once-a-year charge, because that is how it will actually hit your statement.
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Where this came from. americanexpress.com/ca card listing footnote 16, cardmember agreement PDF, insurance summary booklet. 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.