The Best No Annual Fee Credit Cards of 2024
Tom Drake
Tom Drake is the owner and head writer of the award-winning MapleMoney. With a career as a Financial Analyst and over a decade writing about personal finance, Tom has the knowledge to help you get control of your money and make it work for you.
Comments
Thank you so much for this thorough article. It saved me a great deal of time.
You forgot to cover Capital One Platinum MasterCard exclusively for Costco Members.
That is a decent card if you shop at Costco and don’t want to pay an annual fee. I’ll add it the next time I update this post.
The Costco Capital 1 MC only makes $&sense if you do a lot of shopping at Costco since the reward on the Gold card is ONLY 0.05% for the first $3,000 of annual spend there. Several MC’s pay 1% cash-back in a much simpler format, i.e. a “Statement credit” as earned rather than the very cumbersome cheque to cash at Costco format.
The only perk worth anything on this card is the 3% back at restaurants, but again, payable by cheque to you once a year and only cashable at Costco.
What about cards that don’t charge a fee for out of country purchases?
Best card by far is Amazon.ca VISA card with no fee, no FX transaction charge (only charge is VISA International FX spread which is the same for ALL Visa cards), 2% back on Amazon purchases, 1% on all other. No CDW (which is useless on ALL credit cards outside of Canada & US car rentals anyway). Rebate goes straight back to card as earned, unlike Costco MC).
JPMorganChase Bank Canada have just announced they are cancelling all Amazon.ca VISA cards as of 15 March.
What a drag…they must be really fearing the increasing penetration of the “FANGs” into banking!
Common Amazon…let’s have a replacement card pronto! Especially one with no FX transaction fee. Thanks Tom. Great blog!
Is the President’s Choice Elite Mastercard not a better card than the regular President’s Choice Mastercard cause you can earn more points?
I struggled with that choice, the reason I didn’t put it here is because of the minimum income limit. As people earn more, they often spend more, and then there are better cards where the annual fee makes sense. I do have the President’s Choice Financial World Elite MasterCard included best cash back credit cards post.
I’m getting myself a Tangerine Money-Back card as I shop a lot. Thanks for the tips, Tom!
It would be nice to have the credit cards and their benefits listed in a table so one can compare them easily to each other in one View.
Another suggestion is to put the dollar value of a point of each card.
I recall seeing that the US transaction fee for Tangerine was 1.5% before. So did it go up?
Amazon.ca Visa card ended March 2018 as well as Marriott Visa card. Both were good as had no international transaction fee. What other visa card would you recommend without the international transaction fee?
For the Tangerine card, does anyone know which establishments qualify as “grocery”? We do all our grocery shopping at Costco. I can’t find anything on the Tangerine web site on this topic. I thought I read somewhere that Costco counts as “other”.
We are very pleased with Rogers CC. They give 1.75% back and no fee if you are with rogers.Whatever we earn will be taken off our phonebill
Fido mastercard Earn 4% unlimited cash back rewards on all purchases in a foreign currency – from international websites to anywhere you travel abroad, and 1.5% in Canada.
(yes the charge you 2.5% exchange rate but you get 4% back). No annual fee. I do not have a FIDO phone but use the credit as payment on my MC bill in January.
I found this article intriguing enough that I went for the Tangerine card – which I am waiting to receive – and opened up the chequing and savings accounts with them to take full advantage of the cashback features you wrote about. Thanks!
It never ceases to amaze my how these “best card” articles continue to ignore the Options M/C from Canadian Tire Financial. Best credit card ever.
Robbie, store credit cards are very limited. If you shop at those stores enough, it can certainly work out better, but if your spending is mostly outside the store, this car doesn’t even provide a 1% reward. For most people, all these cards will provide a higher reward on total spending.