Pros and Cons
Pros
No annual fee
High rewards rate
Intro balance transfer fee
Cons
No intro APR period on purchases
Detailed Review
The Citi Double Cash® Card is a valuable workhorse among credit cards. With superior flat-rate cash back, it’s ideal for consumers who want low-hassle cash rewards on everything they charge. What it lacks in sizzle, it makes up for in daily dependability. It’s a Honda Accord in a credit card market that’s lately gotten jammed with Lamborghini wannabes.
Most of what you need to know: The card gives you 2% cash back on every purchase — 1% when you make it, and another 1% back when you pay it off. Rewards are unlimited, and the annual fee is $0.
The Citi Double Cash® Card stands up well on its own, but it also makes an ideal companion to a bonus-category credit card for those who use a two-card strategy to maximize cash back. And you can transfer rewards to a handful of partners to potentially snag outsize value.
On the downside, the card offers no 0% introductory period for purchases, which is nearly table stakes for top-tier cash back cards. Even so, to get good, reliable rewards with minimum effort (or cost), this card should be among the top few you consider.
Citi Double Cash® Card: Basics
Card type: Cash back.
Annual fee: $0.
Sign-up bonus: Earn $200 cash back after you spend $1,500 on purchases in the first 6 months of account opening. This bonus offer will be fulfilled as 20,000 ThankYou® Points, which can be redeemed for $200 cash back.
Rewards: 2% cash back on purchases, distributed in two stages:
-
1% back for every dollar spent.
-
1% back for every dollar paid off.
Cardholders also get 5% total cash back on hotels, car rentals and attractions when they book through Citi’s portal.
Redemption options: Statement credit, bank account deposit or a check. You can also transfer your points to a handful of partners, including JetBlue, Wyndham and more.
Interest rate: 0% intro APR on balance transfers for 18 months, and then the ongoing APR of 18.24%-28.24% Variable APR.
Balance transfer fee: 3% of the amount transferred or $5 (whichever is greater) for transfers completed within the first four months of account opening; 5% fee or $5, whichever is greater, after that.
Foreign transaction fee: 3%.
High rewards rate
The industry standard for cash back used to be 1%. As its name implies, the Citi Double Cash® Card essentially doubles that rate, paying 1% back on purchases and 1% after paying the bill. The sooner you pay your balance, the sooner you earn the second half of the rewards. That’s a powerful incentive to pay your credit card bill in full every month, which we recommend you do anyway to avoid interest.
While we still think this is a fine card, it’s not quite the industry unicorn it used to be. Other cards also offer 2% cash back or more on purchases.
Simplicity
Many cash-back cards offer bonus categories — some of them permanent, some that change from time to time and some that adjust with your spending. They allow you to earn extra rewards in featured categories, such as gas stations, restaurants and home improvement stores. They can be a hassle to keep track of. Some limit the amount of spending eligible for bonus rewards, and all spending over that limit earns a mundane 1% cash back.
With the Citi Double Cash® Card, you can be a lazy optimizer and whip out the same card all the time, without thinking about where you’re using the card and whether you’ve reached the limit for a bonus spending category. That said, there’s one opportunity to earn extra rewards: 5% total cash back on hotels, car rentals and attractions when you book through Citi’s portal.
Flexibility
Even though the Citi Double Cash® Card is considered a cash-back credit card, technically what you’re earning are Citi ThankYou points. And while those points can easily be turned into cash at a rate of a penny each, they could potentially be even more valuable when used for travel.
The card features a handful of travel partners, including JetBlue, Wyndham and Choice Privileges, and depending on your credit card strategy and travel goals, this conversion flexibility could potentially increase the value of your rewards, should you find a good deal on flights or hotels with those partners.
That’s especially true if you happen to hold multiple Citi cards because you can combine points across them all. While the Citi Double Cash® Card features only a few transfer partners, other Citi products — like the Citi Strata Premier® Card or Citi Prestige® Card — feature more than a dozen.
