Skip to content
Sense AICheck any bill →
CardsCompare cards
General information and comparison estimates only. Not financial, credit, tax, legal or health advice, and it does not consider your circumstances.General information and estimates only. Not financial, credit, tax or health advice.
Data & methodology · Snapshot 2026-09-07

Where our numbers come from

We don't guess and we don't take an issuer's word for it. The CardSense Card Index is built from government open data as an indicative snapshot. Here's the whole supply chain, including what the data can and can't tell us.

Read the source

Enumerate every active banking data holder from the ACCC CDR Register, then pull each one's CRED_AND_CHRG_CARDS product list and detail.

Normalise & filter

Parse the purchase and cash-advance interest rates, detect the annual-fee row and any rewards program, and drop business/commercial cards.

Aggregate & publish

Rank by purchase rate, compute the national snapshot (lowest, median, average), and write it to the index the pages and API read from.

Fail safe

If a refresh returns nothing usable, the previous good data is left untouched. The index never overwrites real numbers with zeros.

Questions people ask

Where does CardSense get its data?
From the Consumer Data Right (CDR) banking Product Reference Data feed. Every authorised deposit-taking institution must publish its advertised products, including credit cards (the CRED_AND_CHRG_CARDS category), as a free, public, government-mandated API. CardSense reads those feeds directly; there is no middleman and no consent required, because this is advertised product data, not anyone's account data.
How often is it updated?
A scheduled job re-reads every issuer's card feed weekly, re-normalises it and refreshes the index. Each page shows the snapshot date so you always know how current the numbers are.
How are cards ranked?
By the advertised PURCHASE interest rate, lowest first: the rate that applies when you carry a balance. We also capture the cash-advance rate, whether the card charges a recurring annual fee, and whether it runs a rewards or frequent-flyer program.
Why is the annual fee sometimes shown without a dollar amount?
The CDR feed reliably flags whether a card has a recurring annual fee, but issuers rarely populate the actual dollar amount in the open data. Rather than guess, CardSense shows whether an annual fee applies and the amount only when the issuer publishes it. We'd rather be honest about a data gap than invent a number.
Which cards are excluded?
Business, commercial, corporate, purchasing and SMSF cards are filtered out so the index reflects cards a typical consumer can compare. Everything else advertised through the CDR is included.
Is this financial advice?
No. CardSense is general information compiled from public data. It is not credit assistance, a recommendation, or personal financial advice. Always confirm a card's current rate, fees and features with the issuer before applying.

See the ranking

Every Australian credit card, sorted by purchase rate, updated weekly.

Prefer the machine-readable version? The ranking is also a public JSON API.