The short version
A cash back card tells you what it is worth. A points card does not. Five points a dollar means nothing until somebody decides what a point is worth, and whoever decides that controls the ranking. So here is our number, and here is exactly how we got to it.
- American Express Membership Rewards and Aeroplan: 2.0¢ a point. Both transfer into award flights, and two cents is achievable on a good redemption.
- Everything else: the rate the issuer publishes. Scene+ is 1,000 points for $10 whether you redeem for travel or at the Sobeys till. RBC publishes 100 Avion points for $1. WestJet points are pegged at 100 to the dollar. National Bank publishes 10,000 A la carte points for $100 of travel. TD publishes 200 TD Rewards points for $1 through Expedia For TD, which is half a cent. None of those are judgement calls, and we do not inflate them.
Every dollar figure on our comparison page uses those two numbers, and every card page shows the valuation we applied to it.
Why two cents for Membership Rewards, and what it assumes
Two cents is the most generous figure we think is defensible, and we want to be direct about what it assumes: that you will transfer your points to an airline and book award travel with them, rather than taking the statement credit.
If you take the statement credit, Membership Rewards are worth one cent. That is the guaranteed floor, available to everybody, requiring nothing. Two cents requires you to learn a transfer partner, find award availability on a route you actually want, and book it. Plenty of people do this. Plenty of people intend to and never get round to it.
This matters more than it sounds. At two cents the American Express Cobalt is the highest-value card we track. At one cent it is second, behind the Scotiabank Gold American Express. That is a whole assumption’s worth of difference, resting on a number no issuer publishes.
So we built you a switch
On the comparison page there is a toggle marked Value points at cash-out. Turn it on and every points programme drops to one cent, transfer partners ignored, and the rankings re-sort in front of you.
We would rather show you both numbers than ask you to trust one. If a card only looks good under our assumptions, you should be able to see that in about two seconds.
What we will not do
We do not publish a valuation we cannot explain. Where a programme has no transfer partners and a fixed redemption rate, we use that rate even when a higher number would make a card we could earn a commission on look better. There are two live examples. Valuing Scene+ at two cents would push two Scotiabank cards up our rankings. Valuing Avion at the 2.1 cents RBC’s own marketing implies would show the RBC ION+ paying 6% back on groceries, which is not a real thing. We use one cent for both.
Where we have not yet assessed a programme, the card shows a dash rather than a dollar figure. It will rank last as a result. We would rather a good card ranked badly for a while than publish a number we made up.
How our valuations can be wrong
Three ways, and it is worth knowing them:
- Award availability changes. Two cents assumes you can book the flight you want at the price the chart says. Devaluations happen, and they happen without notice.
- It assumes you redeem well. Somebody who transfers points to an airline and books a short domestic economy flight may get less than one cent. The two-cent figure describes a good redemption, not an average one.
- It ignores the cost of your time. Award booking is a hobby for some people and a chore for everybody else.
If any of that sounds like you, use the cash-out toggle. That is what it is there for.
Where the underlying numbers come from
Every earn rate, fee, interest rate and cap on this site is taken from the issuer’s own published material: product pages, rates and fees schedules, cost-of-borrowing disclosures, notices of change and certificates of insurance. We do not take figures from other comparison sites, and where an issuer does not publish something we leave the field blank and say so rather than filling it with a number we found elsewhere.
The point valuations on this page are the one exception, and that is precisely why they get a page of their own.