About Award Rate

Who runs Award Rate?

Award Rate is a small, privately owned publisher. There is no bank, no issuer, no airline, no hotel group and no media holding company on the cap table, and there never has been. The site operates from Sacramento, CA, and launched in 2026.

One editor does all of the work — the research, the data model, the writing and the maintenance — and the site is engineered so that this is a checkable claim rather than a liability: every figure renders from a structured record reconciled against the issuer’s own disclosure, and the build fails when prose and data disagree. The editor’s name, credentials and declared interests are on the team page, and every article carries that byline.

That headcount is a constraint we have chosen. A larger contributor network would let us publish several times as much, and the reason we do not is that we could not personally stand behind it. The gaps in our coverage — business cards most obviously — exist because of that choice, and they are listed below rather than hidden.

What we cover — and what we deliberately do not

A site that claims to cover everything is telling you it has a traffic strategy, not a beat. Ours is deliberately narrow: the money-in and money-out of transferable points, and the award redemptions that make collecting them worth the trouble.

What is in scope

Transferable bank points

The bank currencies that can become airline miles, plus the cards that earn them. This is the center of the site because it is the only part of the hobby where a decision made today still pays out after a devaluation.

Airline and hotel loyalty programs

How each program prices an award, what it charges in surcharges, whether its chart is published, and what a point is worth once it lands there. 21 programs, re-read on a fixed schedule.

Transfer partners and ratios

Every declared route out of every bank and hotel currency we cover — 103 of them from 6 source programs — with the arithmetic of what one point becomes after the conversion.

Travel rewards credit cards

17 cards, each scored on five published axes and each carrying a link to the issuer's own pricing-and-terms page. We review cards we would not recommend, and say so.

Award redemption strategy

Sweet spots, routing rules, partner award space, and the unglamorous mechanics — hold policies, phone-booking fees, married-segment logic — that decide whether a theoretical redemption is a real one.

What we do not cover, and why

Anything that is not a rewards card

No mortgages, no auto loans, no personal loans, no student refinancing, no insurance, no brokerage or crypto accounts. Those verticals pay better than ours. We do not have the expertise to cover them and will not rent our credibility to them.

Credit repair and subprime products

We do not cover secured cards marketed at people rebuilding credit, credit-repair services, or anything sold to a reader whose actual problem is a balance. If you are carrying revolving debt, a rewards card is the wrong product and we would rather say that than rank one for you.

Cards whose terms we cannot independently verify

If an issuer will not publish a machine-readable pricing-and-terms disclosure that we can reconcile against, the card does not go in the database. Two products have been left out on that basis rather than have us paraphrase a marketing page.

Business and corporate cards, for now

A defensible business-card section needs underwriting detail we do not yet have. Rather than publish a thin one because the commissions are attractive, the section does not exist. It is the largest known gap in our coverage.

Deal-chasing and data-point aggregation

We are not a forum, we do not chase targeted offers, and we do not publish the elevated-offer rumour of the week. Everything here is meant to still be true in six months.

How Award Rate makes money

One revenue line: affiliate commission paid by card issuers, through four affiliate networks and a small number of direct issuer programs, when a reader is approved for a card after clicking through from this site. That is the whole business model. There is no display advertising, no sponsored content, no paid newsletter placement, no lead sale, no data brokerage and no paywall.

The commission is paid on approval, not on the click, and we are never told who was approved — networks report conversions in aggregate. What that means in practice is set out in the full advertiser disclosure, which names each network, lists every card by the network that fulfils it, and explains exactly what compensation is and is not allowed to touch.

Two consequences are worth stating plainly, because they are the ones a reader can verify. Of the 17 cards in the database, 15 earn us nothing and are shown anyway with an unpaid-listing label, because leaving them out would make the comparison dishonest. And 2 cards currently have the apply link switched off entirely: the offer was withdrawn, so we removed the link rather than send a reader to a page that no longer shows what we described.

How often is the data on this site actually re-checked?

Freshness is the part of this work that is invisible when it is done well and catastrophic when it is not. A rewards card page is a statement about a live financial product; the day it goes stale it becomes a false one, sitting next to a link we get paid for.

So every category of data on this site has a named owner, a fixed cadence and a trigger that overrides the cadence. The right-hand column is read from the data at build time — it is when that work was last actually completed, not when we intended to do it.

Queue clearAs of this build, none of the 17 cards on the site is past its 90-day re-verification window.

What we will not do, at any price

Every one of these has been offered to us at least once. They are listed here so that a reader can hold us to them, and so that the next person who asks knows the answer before they write.

• We do not sell placement. No amount of commission moves a card up a ranked list. The order in a “best” list is computed from published scores and derived economics, and commission rate is not one of the inputs.
• We do not publish sponsored posts. Not labeled ones, not unlabelled ones, not “partner content”, not a guest post with a link in it.
• We do not let issuers review copy. No issuer, network or PR agency has ever seen an Award Rate article before publication, and none is offered the opportunity to comment on a rating.
• We do not remove a criticism on request. We correct errors, immediately and in public. We do not soften an accurate negative because an account manager asked.
• We do not put an apply link on a card we would not recommend to someone we know. If a card is in the database purely as a comparison point, it is shown without a call to action.
• We do not use scarcity or urgency language. No countdowns, no “offer ending soon” unless the issuer has published an end date, no implied approval.
• We do not run third-party tracking. There is no analytics script, no advertising pixel and no third-party request of any kind on this site — which you can verify in your browser’s network tab in about ten seconds.

How to check our work

Trust claims are cheap. These are the four places where ours can be tested against evidence rather than taken on faith.

1. The valuation methodology. The sampling frame, the estimator, the exclusions and the known failure modes are all published, along with the sample size behind every currency. Start with how we value points and then check a figure you disagree with against its sample.
2. The changelog. Valuations are republished each quarter with the previous figure alongside the current one, so a devaluation is visible rather than quietly edited away. The current model is Q3 2026, published August 6, 2026.
3. The corrections log. Every material error we have made is on one public page, with what we said, what was true, who found it and what changed in our process afterwards.
4. The per-card disclosure table. The advertiser disclosure lists every card we cover next to the network that fulfils it and whether we are paid for it at all. No other site in this category publishes that table; it is the one that would embarrass us if we were shading rankings.

If you find something wrong — a stale offer, a partner that has been dropped, a number that does not reconcile — tell us. Reported errors are corrected in public and credited to the person who found them, by name if they want it.