PC Financial · Mastercard
Best for Loblaws and Shoppers shoppers
4.5% at Shoppers Drug Mart and 3% at Loblaws banners, with no annual fee. If you shop there anyway this is one of the best free cards in Canada. If you do not, it is a 1% card.
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
- 4.5% back at Shoppers Drug Mart and Pharmaprix, which is the highest drugstore rate here
- 3% at Loblaws, No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, Zehrs, Provigo and other PC banners
- No spending cap is published on any earn tier
- $1,000,000 travel medical, rental car coverage, purchase protection and extended warranty on a free card
- 24/7 concierge
Watch out for
- PC Optimum points are worth 0.1 cents each, so a 30 points headline is 3%, not 30%
- Points only buy groceries and Shoppers merchandise. There is no cash out and no transfer partner
- Everything outside the Loblaws and Shoppers world earns 1%
- Esso and Mobil earn per litre rather than per dollar, so the fuel rate does not scale with the price of gas
- Travel medical is only 10 days and only for cardholders under 65
- The welcome offer is worth $20, which is close to nothing
- PC Financial publishes no income requirement anywhere we could reach, which is unusual for a World Elite card
What this card earns
- Groceries
- 30x
- Drugstore
- 45x
- Everything else
- 10x
- What we value a point at
- 0.1¢
The earning fine print
PC Optimum points are worth a tenth of a cent each, which PC Financial publishes, so the big multipliers are smaller than they look: 30 points a dollar is 3% and 45 points a dollar is 4.5%. The 30 points rate applies at stores carrying President's Choice and Joe Fresh products, meaning Loblaws banners, and 45 points applies at Shoppers Drug Mart and Pharmaprix. Everything else earns 10 points, which is 1%. GAS IS DELIBERATELY BLANK. Esso and Mobil earn 30 points per LITRE rather than per dollar, which is about 3 cents a litre and cannot be expressed as a percentage without assuming a fuel price. No spending cap is published on any tier.
The welcome offer
- Welcome bonus
- 20,000 points after you spend $50, within 2 months
- Offer ends
- 2026-12-31
Fees and interest rates
- Annual fee
- None
- Foreign transaction fee
- 2.5%
- Cash advance fee
- $5
- Dishonoured payment fee
- $42
- Purchase APR
- 21.99%
- Cash advance APR
- 22.97%
Who can get this card
- Minimum personal income
- Not published by the issuer
Insurance and benefits
- Travel medical
- $1,000,000 first 10 days of a trip
- Rental car damage waiver
- Included
- Purchase protection
- Included
- Extended warranty
- Included
- Concierge
- Included
What the benefits really mean
Travel medical covers 10 days and only cardholders under 65. Rental car coverage runs to 31 consecutive days. Quebec residents pay 21.97% on cash advances rather than 22.97% and no dishonoured payment or over-limit fee. CAUTION: the earn rates and insurance figures come from a benefits guide dated May 2023, because PC Financial's product pages are JavaScript rendered and could not be read. Also note that pcoptimum.ca shows 5 and 10 points per dollar next to World Elite headings; those are PC Money debit account rates, not credit card rates.
Our verdict
A genuinely strong free card for a specific and very large group of Canadians: people who buy their groceries at a Loblaws banner and their prescriptions at Shoppers. For that household 3% and 4.5% with no fee beats most of the paid cards on this page.
The catch is that the points are not money. They buy groceries and Shoppers merchandise and nothing else, so if you were planning to bank the rewards or spend them on travel, this is the wrong card. And do not read 30 points a dollar as anything other than 3%.
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Compare this against every card we track
Where this came from. pcfinancial.ca disclosure summary July 2026, World Elite benefits guide, PC Optimum legal page. 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.