The parts nobody explains properly

What actually moves your credit score

A FICO score is built from five inputs, and they don't carry equal weight. Knowing the order tells you where to spend your effort:

• Payment history — about 35%. Whether you pay on time. This is the largest single factor, and one 30-day late payment can cost a meaningful chunk of points.
• Amounts owed — about 30%. Mostly your credit utilisation: balance divided by limit. Under 30% is the usual advice; under 10% is where the best scores sit.
• Length of credit history — about 15%. The average age of your accounts. This is why closing an old card can hurt.
• Credit mix — about 10%. Having both revolving credit (cards) and instalment loans.
• New credit — about 10%. Recent applications and hard inquiries.

Two-thirds of your score is therefore just pay on time and keep the balance low. A single card used lightly and paid in full does both.

Secured or unsecured: which is genuinely cheaper

The instinct is to avoid secured cards because they want money up front. Run the numbers and that instinct is often wrong.

A typical subprime unsecured card charges $75–$99 a year against a $300 limit, sometimes with a monthly servicing fee on top from year two. Over two years you might pay $150–$250 and never get any of it back.

A typical secured card takes a $200 refundable deposit and charges $0–$35 a year. Over the same two years you pay $0–$70 — and the $200 comes back when you graduate or close in good standing.

The deposit isn't a cost. It's a temporarily frozen asset. The annual fee is the cost, and it's the unsecured card that charges more of it.

Unsecured genuinely wins when you can't spare $200 today, or you need available credit immediately for something unavoidable.

Why "graduation" matters more than the rewards

A secured card that graduates returns your deposit and converts to a normal unsecured line — keeping the account's age, which protects that 15% of your score. A card with no upgrade path leaves you closing the account to get your money back, losing the account age with it.

Every card on this site is flagged for whether it graduates. If two cards look similar, the one that graduates is nearly always the better choice.

Five mistakes that cost people the most

• Applying to several cards at once. Each one is a hard inquiry. Apply to one, wait for the decision.
• Chasing rewards while carrying a balance. At 29% APR, interest eats a 1.5% cash back rate roughly twenty times over. Pay in full or ignore rewards entirely.
• Closing the card once the score recovers. That shortens your history and raises utilisation across the board. Keep it open, use it lightly.
• Only paying the minimum. It keeps you current but leaves the balance high, so utilisation keeps the score down while interest compounds.
• Missing the annual fee post. On a card with a $75 fee and a $300 limit, the fee alone is 25% utilisation the moment it posts. Budget for it.

How we rate cards

Every card gets a score out of five, set editorially against fixed criteria. Commercial relationships play no part in it. The weighting:

• Total first-year cost (30%) — annual fee, monthly fees, and any set-up charge, weighed against the credit line you actually receive.
• Approval realism (25%) — whether someone in the stated credit band is genuinely likely to be approved.
• Path forward (20%) — automatic reviews, credit-line increases, and whether the card graduates.
• Terms (15%) — APR, foreign transaction fees, and whether all three bureaus are reported to.
• Rewards (10%) — weighted last on purpose. In this credit tier, cost and approval matter far more.

A card charging $99 against a $300 limit will rate poorly here even if it pays us well, because it's poor value. Where that's the case, we say so in the card's cons.