How we rank: every assumption, published

Rankings are the output of a formula, never an editor's opinion or a commercial arrangement. This page lists every assumption the calculators use. When a figure below changes, the rankings change.

Credit cards

First-year value = rewards earned + welcome bonus + perks you said you'd use − fees − FX costs − interest.

• Rewards: category earn rates applied to your stated spend mix. Points are converted at published pence-per-point assumptions (listed per card).
• Bonuses: counted only when your stated spend meets the qualifying condition.
• Perks: counted only when you tick them, valued conservatively, and spend-conditional credits only count when your spend clears the threshold.
• Interest: if you tell us you usually carry a balance, we assume an average carried balance of one month's spend at the card's purchase rate, not its representative APR. The representative figure bundles in the annual fee, which we already count separately, so using it would charge you the fee twice. Where an issuer publishes a representative APR we show it on the card. Pure charge cards are flagged unsuitable; charge cards with an opt-in facility to carry a balance are modelled at their purchase rate.
• FX: your stated foreign-currency share × the card's non-sterling fee.
• Eligibility: indicative trading-time and turnover thresholds, plus requirements we can't score because the quiz doesn't ask: a director's personal income, or holding a business current account with the issuing bank. Ineligible cards are shown, greyed, with what would unlock them.

Eligibility: what the criteria check is, and isn't

Each card shows how many of its published requirements your answers meet: things the issuer states publicly, such as minimum trading time or turnover. Hover or tap the marker to see each requirement, your answer, and how far short you are, with a link to the issuer's terms.

• It is not a credit check. Nothing here touches your credit file and no search is recorded.
• It is not a prediction of acceptance. We publish no likelihood or percentage, because no issuer publishes the data one would need and we hold none. Issuers assess far more than they publish: credit history, affordability, sector, and their own appetite at the time.
• Cards you don't yet meet are still shown, with the value you'd get once you qualify. They rank below cards you do meet, but nothing is hidden.

Fuel cards

Annual saving = pence-per-litre discount × the share of your litres that land on the card's network − account and per-card fees. Network fit is estimated per route type; EV-heavy fleets see fuel-only cards flagged.

Point valuations: where our numbers come from

Cards that earn points rather than cashback can only be ranked in pounds if a value is put on the point. No issuer publishes one, so we cite a named third party rather than invent a figure, and we publish it here because an unstated valuation quietly decides the ranking. These are editorial estimates, not facts. A point is worth what you redeem it for.

Amex Membership Rewards: Head for Points benchmarks airline-mile transfers at "0.8p to 1p each depending on programme and route" and calls that very conservative; MR converts 1:1 to Avios. Statement credit pays 0.45p and gift cards 0.5p, which is the floor. We use 0.8p, the bottom of the airline benchmark, because a cardholder who does not optimise transfers should not see an inflated card value.

Capital on Tap points: Issuer-derived, not an estimate: Capital on Tap markets the card as "unlimited 1% cashback" at 1 point per £1, so a point redeemed as cashback is worth exactly 1p (10,000 points = £100). Travel conversion differs by tier: 0.8 Avios or Virgin Points per point on the free card, 1:1 on Pro; at the 1p Avios benchmark that is 0.8p-1p, so cashback at 1p is never the worse redemption on the free card.

Avios: Head for Points' working benchmark: "we use 1p as a ball-park figure". Their floor of 0.5p is what a Nectar transfer yields; flight redemptions in their worked examples range roughly 0.87p-2.0p. We use the 1p benchmark rather than a best-case flight figure, because a business cardholder who does not optimise redemptions should not see an inflated card value.

We deliberately use a conservative benchmark rather than a best-case redemption. Valuing points at what a savvy traveller could extract would inflate every points card against the cashback cards they compete with, and most business cardholders are not optimising redemptions. The weekly data pipeline watches each source, so if a valuation moves, our rankings move with it.

Commercial disclosure

This site is intended to be funded by commission from providers, and we expect to have those arrangements in place in future. We do not have them yet. Today no provider pays us: every Apply button goes straight to the issuer's own page, with no tracking codes and no commercial arrangement behind it. That is a statement about where we currently are, not a promise to stay there; when it changes, this page changes with it.

What will not change is the rule underneath it: commission never enters the calculation. A product's position here is the output of the formula on this page and nothing else, whether it pays us or not.

The one exception is Capital on Tap, where the link is a personal referral link rather than a commercial commission. It earns nothing from ranking position, it is not counted anywhere in the calculation, and Capital on Tap cards win or lose here on the same arithmetic as every other product. If that arrangement ever changes to a commercial one, this page will say so.

Data freshness

Every product figure carries a source URL and a last-verified date, refreshed by a weekly review pipeline.