Terms of use

The short version

These terms govern your use of awardrate.com. By using the site you accept them. They are written to be read: where a clause has legal effect, it says what it means in ordinary words rather than in capital letters.

Who these terms are between

The site is published by Award Rate, an independent publication operated from California, at , Sacramento, CA 95831, United States. “We”, “us” and “Award Rate” mean that company. “You” means you, reading this.

This is research, not financial advice

Award Rate is a publisher and comparison service. It is not a bank, a lender, a credit card issuer, a broker, an insurance producer, a registered investment adviser or a financial planner acting for you, and it is not licensed as any of those things.

Nothing on this site is financial, legal, tax or investment advice. Nothing here is tailored to your circumstances, because we do not know them. We do not accept credit applications, we make no credit decisions, and we have no influence over whether you are approved for anything or on what terms. No fiduciary or advisory relationship arises between us because you read a page here.

Decisions about credit are consequential and personal. If you carry revolving debt, if you are near an issuer’s application limits, or if a product’s cost would strain your budget, a rewards card is very likely the wrong product — our reviews say so, and a professional who knows your situation is a better source than any website.

Card offers and terms belong to the issuer, not to us

Every card offer, rate, fee, benefit and condition described on this site belongs to the issuing bank. Issuers change offers and terms at any time and without notice, and they are not obliged to tell us when they do.

We reconcile every card record against the issuer’s own pricing-and-terms disclosure on a published cycle, and each card page shows the date that was last done. Even so, the issuer’s disclosure is always the authority and our page never is. Read it before you apply; every card on this site links to it directly.

We are not a party to any agreement between you and an issuer, we cannot vary its terms, and we cannot intervene in a dispute with one. We also do not review every card available in the market, and the offers shown here may not be every offer available to you — a targeted offer inside your own online banking may well be better than anything we can show.

What our valuations are, and what they are not

Our point valuations are published estimates produced by a sampled model whose method, sampling frame and exclusions are set out in full on the methodology page. The current model is Q3 2026.

A valuation is a decision threshold — a benchmark for choosing between paying with points and paying with money. It is not a market price, not an offer to buy or sell, not an appraisal of your balance, and not a promise that any particular seat or room exists at any price. Points and miles are issued by programs that can devalue or terminate them unilaterally, and no figure we publish changes that.

Every dollar figure on this site derives from that model. Where we say a bonus or a benefit is “worth” something, we mean at our published valuation, in the quarter stated, and the figure moves when the model does.

Affiliate links

Some of the card offers on this site are from advertisers who compensate us when a reader is approved after clicking through. That compensation can affect placement in modules explicitly labeled as featured; it does not affect our ratings, our valuations or the order of our ranked lists. Which cards pay us — and which do not — is published in full on our advertiser disclosure, and the rules that keep the two apart are in our editorial policy.

Using, quoting and citing our research

This section is the license our published valuation dataset refers to, and it is deliberately permissive. We would rather be the source that gets cited than the site nobody reaches, and a restrictive license on a reference work is self-defeating.

What you may do, without asking and without paying

• Quote up to roughly 150 words of any article, with attribution to Award Rate and a link to the page you took it from.
• Reproduce a single row of a table — one currency’s valuation, one card’s figure, one transfer partner — with attribution and the quarter or verification date attached.
• Reuse our published point valuations in your own analysis, commercial or not, provided you name the quarter and link to the methodology.
• Cite us in a paper, a newsletter, a video, a forum post or an answer generated by a language model. Attribution is requested in all of those; no permission and no fee is required for any of them.
• Screenshot a table or a chart for commentary or criticism, including criticism of us.

What is not covered by that license

• Republish a table in full as your own dataset, or rebuild our valuation table on your own site without attribution and a link.
• Quote a valuation without its quarter. A figure without its quarter is a rumour, and it is the single most common way our numbers get misused.
• Present our research as an issuer’s, or in a way that implies an issuer, program or airline endorsed it.
• Alter a figure and keep our name on it.
• Scrape the site at a rate that degrades it for other readers, or systematically harvest it to reconstitute the underlying database.

Researchers, journalists and other publishers can also have the underlying observation set behind the valuations — route, date, cabin, program, points required, cash comparable, cash paid — on the same attribution terms. Write to editors@awardrate.com naming the quarter and the currencies you need.

Everything else on the site — the writing, the design, the code, the card and program databases as compilations — remains our copyright, and the license above is the extent of the permission granted.

What you may not do

• Do not use the site in a way that breaks the law, or that helps anyone else to.
• Do not attempt to interfere with the site’s operation, probe it for vulnerabilities without telling us, or place load on it that degrades it for other readers. If you find a security issue, we would genuinely like to hear about it.
• Do not misrepresent your relationship with us. Nobody is an Award Rate partner, affiliate or representative, and we have no referral program for readers.
• Do not use our name, marks or content to promote a product or service in a way that implies we endorsed it. We do not endorse products in exchange for anything.

Trademarks and third-party names

Card names, program names, airline and hotel brands, and issuer marks belong to their respective owners. They appear here for identification and comparison — which is what nominative fair use is for — and their appearance implies no affiliation with, sponsorship by, or endorsement from any of those companies. None of them has reviewed or approved anything on this site.

Links to other sites

We link to issuers, programs, affiliate networks and other publishers. We do not control those sites, we are not responsible for their content, accuracy, availability or practices, and a link is not an endorsement. Once you follow one you are subject to that site’s own terms and privacy policy — including the affiliate networks described in our privacy policy.

No warranty

We work hard at accuracy — a published method, a fixed re-verification cycle, an automated audit on every build and a public corrections log — and we still cannot warrant that everything here is correct or current at the moment you read it. Offers change without notice, programs devalue without warning, and some of what we publish is estimate rather than fact and says so.

The site is therefore provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Where we get something wrong, tell us: we correct errors publicly and quickly, and the corrections log is our record of doing it.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Award Rate and the people who work on it are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss arising out of your use of this site — including lost points or miles, a devaluation, a declined application, an award that was no longer available, fees or interest you incurred, or any decision you made in reliance on something published here.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain liabilities, and nothing here excludes liability for fraud, for fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. Where a limitation is not permitted, our liability is limited to the minimum the law allows.

You agree to indemnify us against claims arising from your misuse of the site or your breach of these terms — a standard clause, and one we have never had cause to use.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts located in Sacramento County, California have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer-law provisions of your own country.

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Our not enforcing something immediately does not waive our right to enforce it later.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Material changes will be described plainly with a new effective date rather than slipped in as an edit, and the citation license above will not be narrowed retrospectively — anything you have already published under it stays licensed. The current version is effective August 4, 2026.

Contact

Write to editors@awardrate.com, or by post to Award Rate, , Sacramento, CA 95831, United States. Licensing and reuse questions are usually answered the same week, and the answer is almost always yes.