2026 editorial shortlist
Cards for Rent
Earn points on your biggest monthly bill without paying a swipe fee.
Almost every card charges a 2-3% processing fee to pay rent, which wipes out any rewards you’d earn. The Bilt cards are built specifically to waive that fee — but the rent earn rate isn’t flat. It’s tiered based on how much non-rent spending you also put on the same card each month.
These editorial shortlists compare published reward rates, annual fees, spending caps, and practical usage constraints. They are not personalized optimizer rankings, and affiliate relationships do not determine the ordering.
Editorial picks
Featured pick
Bilt Obsidian
Bilt
$95/year
No rent processing fee. Rent rate is tiered by non-rent spend on the same card: roughly 0.5x once non-rent spend reaches 25% of rent, up to 1.25x once it matches rent 1:1. Also earns 3x on dining or groceries (your choice) and 2x on travel.
Bilt Blue
Bilt
$0/year
The no-fee version of the same tiered rent structure — no category bonuses, but no annual fee either.
Bilt Palladium
Bilt
$495/year
Same tiered rent earning plus 2x on dining, travel, and groceries and $200/year in automatic Bilt Cash — only worth it at high non-rent spend.
Tips
Bilt’s rent rate is NOT flat: it steps up in tiers based on your non-rent spend as a percentage of rent — roughly 25% → 0.5x, 50% → 0.75x, 75% → 1x, and 100%+ → 1.25x on rent. Below the first tier you still earn a small fixed baseline.
To hit the top 1.25x tier, your non-rent spending on the Bilt card needs to roughly match your rent payment for that month — that’s a real behavior change, not automatic.
Every other major card either blocks rent payments outright or charges a processing fee that erases the rewards, so Bilt is the practical default for rent even before comparing rates.
The optimizer models the tiered structure directly from your actual spend profile, so it will tell you the real expected rent-earn rate instead of the marketing-headline 1.25x.
Complete setup
Cards selected for one category rarely make the strongest modeled overall wallet.
These editorial picks focus on rent, but the modeled combination depends on your total spending across every category. The optimizer models eligible combinations and tells you whether its result was proven optimal within that run's inputs or was the strongest valid setup found before timeout.
Run the optimizer — freeExplore other categories
Not financial advice. OptimalCardSetup provides mathematical optimization tools for educational and informational purposes only. This does not constitute financial, investment, or credit advice. Card rates, fees, and benefits shown are last checked as of Aug 2, 2026. Terms may change — always verify current details with the card issuer before applying.