Most people choose a credit card by asking one question: what's the card with the best rewards?
It's not a bad question. It's just not the first one.
The one that should come first is: does my actual spending earn those rewards?
This pattern shows up clearly in our own data. 76% of clicks on our card comparison page come from people browsing general cashback rankings, rather than searching by their own spend category. Most cardholders are optimising for the highest advertised rate, not the rate that matches how they actually spend.
A card's advertised cashback or miles rate applies to specific transaction types—dining, online shopping, overseas spend, petrol—defined by the bank and governed by Merchant Category Codes assigned to each retailer.
Spend outside those categories earns at the base rate: typically 0.3% cashback, or around 1.2 to 1.4 miles per dollar for miles cards in Singapore.
Why do reward rates differ based on categories?
Every credit card transaction generates a fee paid by the merchant's bank to the card-issuing bank. This is known as the interchange fee, the economic engine behind your rewards programme. The actual fee amount paid by the merchant depends on which category they belong to.
That variance by merchant category is the key point. Different merchant types like restaurants, supermarkets, utilities, government services attract different interchange rates. Because the revenue the bank collects from a dining transaction differs from what it collects on a utilities payment, the rewards it can afford to offer differ accordingly.
*Cashback rates are indicative of the Singapore market as of July. Actual rates vary by card and are subject to minimum spend requirements and T&Cs. Always check the bank's official website for current terms.
In Singapore, interchange fees are set by the card networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express) and are not capped by regulation. Unfortunately for us, card networks do not publicly disclose interchange rates by merchant category in Singapore.
But the reward rates banks offer give a clear signal of the relative economics: where the bank earns more from the transaction, it can afford to return more to the cardholder.
What 6% cashback actually looked like after a month of real spending
To see how this plays out in practice, consider a scenario that will feel familiar.
Wei Ming is a 34-year-old marketing manager in Singapore—fictional, but the pattern he represents is not.
A few months ago, he came across an ad for the Bank X’s Credit Card. The headline: up to 6% cashback on dining. Wei Ming eats out regularly. The rate is one of the highest in the market. It feels like a match. He applies.
A month later, his cashback comes in at S$56.20.
Not nothing. But not what 6% sounded like in his head.
Here is where that S$56.20 actually came from:
Spend proportions and cashback figures are illustrative. Rates accurate as at time of publishing—verify current rates at citibank.com.sg before applying.
The 6% rate is real. It fired on S$900 of Wei Ming's S$2,000 monthly spend—dining and groceries. Online shopping, transport, and utilities—S$1,100, or 55% of his total monthly spend—earned at the base rate of 0.2%. That 55% returned S$2.20.
Bank X’s card was built for someone whose spending is concentrated in dining and groceries. For that person, it delivers. Wei Ming spends on dining—but his actual spend is distributed across five categories, three of which sit entirely outside the card's bonus structure.
He didn't read the ad wrong. The 6% is exactly what it says. He just never asked whether his spending matched the profile the card was designed to reward. And the ad, naturally, wasn't built to prompt that question.
Wei Ming is not unusual. Most people in Singapore spend across a spread of categories. Dining is present in that spread. It is rarely dominant—ranking last among the reward categories shoppers filter by on our platform, behind air-miles, cashback, travel, and online shopping, among others.
A card calibrated to reward dining spend will, by design, earn less on everything else. For most cardholders, everything else is most of the bill.
So before you apply (or keep any card), run this check
1. What are your top two or three spend categories by actual volume?
Not by assumption. By looking at your bank statements. Most people believe they know where their money goes. Most people are wrong, or at least imprecise. Pull three months of statements and rank your categories by dollar amount. The answer is often different from what you expected.
2. Does this card's bonus structure cover those categories?
If your top categories are groceries, transport, and online shopping, a dining card is not optimised for you, regardless of how attractive its dining rate is.
Cards like the OCBC 365 Credit Card are built around everyday spend categories including dining, groceries, and online food delivery. Cards like the HSBC Live+ Credit Card are built around dining, shopping, and entertainment.
They are not the same card, and matching the right one to your actual spend pattern is the entire exercise.
3. Will you consistently hit the minimum spend requirement without changing your behaviour?
This is the question that catches the most people. Over 17 cards on our platform require a minimum monthly spend, most commonly S$800, to unlock their advertised rates.
Miss the threshold in any given month and the bonus rate doesn't apply; you earn the base rate instead.
And these aren't fringe picks: the OCBC 365 and UOB One Cards are the two most applied-for cards on MoneySmart last month. Even these cards have that minimum monthly spend requirement of S$600 and S$800 respectively before their headline cashback kicks in.
The main issue here is that cardholders tend to spend unevenly. A month with a large one-off purchase may comfortably clear the threshold. A quieter month may not.
Cardholders who are inconsistent earners often find that their effective annual return is significantly lower than the advertised rate implies simply because several months a year, they are earning below 1% on everything.
That’s why it's important to check your spending across many months, to see if it's consistent or if there are significant spikes or dips.
Bottom line: The right card for you is the one whose reward structure most closely matches how you already spend. A reward rate isn't a fixed number—it's a number that becomes true only if your spending makes it true.
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