How we decide a rate is good

The question every page answers

Every shopping portal will tell you today's rate. None of them will tell you whether it's worth acting on. That's the whole point of this site: when Nike shows 8% on TopCashback, the number you actually need is "is 8% good for Nike on TopCashback?"

So every rate here is compared against its own history on that portal, never against another store, and never against another program's points.

The chip next to the rate

Each rate carries a short chip saying how today's number compares to that store's own past on that portal. There are five, and they are the whole scale:

• Highest yet - the top of this pair's recorded range. One label, two scopes: either the highest we have ever tracked for it, or the highest in the past year. Hover the chip and the tooltip says which one you're looking at. We deliberately don't split the label, because with histories this young the distinction tells a reader nothing they can act on.
• Near high - close to the top of that range, not quite at it.
• Above usual - higher than this store normally pays here.
• Typical - about what it usually pays. Not a bad day, just an ordinary one.
• Below usual - lower than normal. If the purchase can wait, waiting is the move.

A small flame rides on Highest yet only in the ever-scope sense, and only once we have watched that pair for 30 days or more. A rate at a one-year high sitting below an older peak never flames, and neither does a young pair, however high it is today. The fleet started running in July 2026, so for now the flame is rare by construction rather than by luck.

Each chip has a four-segment meter beside it, so the scale reads at a glance without relying on colour. The meter is coarser than the labels on purpose: it groups the chips into four steps rather than five, so "Near high" and "Above usual" share a step. Hovering tells you the rest: which comparison the chip made, and the store's usual range in that unit ("Usually 4–6%").

We used to print a percentile instead ("96th"). It was accurate and almost nobody could read it, so it's gone.

Three details make the chips trustworthy:

• They're time-weighted. A rate that sat at 4% for 80 days counts 80 times more than a 10% flash that lasted a day. A one-day spike can't distort the year.
• A rate has to have actually risen to claim a high. A rate that has never moved is trivially sitting at its own maximum, and calling that a high would put "Highest yet" on most of the catalogue. So a rate only reaches the top two chips if it has genuinely spent time below where it is now.
• They need real history. For the first week we watch a pair we show no chip at all. A "high" needs something to be high against, and we would rather show nothing than manufacture a claim.

What the verdict box does

The verdict is the one-sentence answer at the top of a store's page. It turns those stats into plain English, leading with the strongest fact it can honestly state: the highest we've ever tracked beats the highest in the past year, which beats "above its typical range," which beats "about typical." It names the portal and the program every time, and it appends the caveats that matter, such as an "up to" headline that only applies to some categories, or a stale reading we haven't confirmed recently.

One rule inside it is worth spelling out, because it looks like a bug and isn't. When a headline "up to" rate is higher than any category the portal actually publishes, we rank that rate by the best category it really reaches, and the verdict then drops the history claim entirely and just says what the store pays right now. Saying "3% is the highest yet" would be a claim about a number the history never held.

The honesty rules

A few rules we hold ourselves to, because a claim you can screenshot is a claim we have to defend:

• Native units, always. We show miles as miles and points as points, never silently converted into dollars. Airline portals pay miles, card portals pay points, cashback portals pay cash, and 3 mi/$ is not "about 4%" unless you choose a valuation. The optional Rank by value view does exactly that, using your own point values (our defaults stand in until you set yours), with the assumption shown and editable.
• Stale stays visible, badged. If a portal hasn't been confirmed within about 2.5x its normal check interval, the rate gets a stale badge with the last-confirmed time, and it stays ranked. Hiding data would be tidier and less honest.
• Provenance on hover. Every number shows the portal's exact wording, character for character, and when we read it.
• "Up to" means up to. Tiered headline rates keep their up to badge, and the fine print doesn't disappear into a bigger font.

Where the data comes from

We read each portal's own store pages on a schedule, most every 6 to 24 hours. The data status page lists every portal we track and when it was last confirmed, including the ones we check by hand weekly. If something looks off on a store you know well, use the Report this rate button on that page: reports land directly in our review queue.

The short version: we do the comparison a careful person would do with a spreadsheet and a year of patience (and we show our work).