IKEA Visa Credit Card

Rewards by category

Our take

The IKEA Visa Credit Card from Bread Financial has no annual fee and earns 5% at IKEA, including installation and assembly services, 3% on dining, groceries and utilities, and 1% on everything else. No IKEA Family membership is required, which makes it easier to qualify for than most store-branded cards. The 5% on services is the genuinely uncommon part — a kitchen install or an assembly appointment earns the top rate, not the base rate, which is where the card does its best work for anyone in the middle of a big home project.

The rates are not what they look like, and that is the part worth reading twice. Rewards arrive as IKEA certificates in $15 increments, 60 to 90 days after you earn them, and they are spendable only at IKEA. Each certificate must be used in a single transaction, with any unused value forfeited, and certificates expire. Because of the delay, the forfeiture rule and the expiration, SwipeCaddy values them at 0.8 cents on the dollar rather than a full cent. Run the multiplication and the real returns are about 4% at IKEA, 2.4% on dining, groceries and utilities, and 0.8% on everything else — still respectable in the bonus categories, but a flat 2% cash-back card quietly beats this card's 3% tier.

Two more details decide whether you actually collect the bonus rates. Bread defines utilities narrowly — electric, home-heating gas, water, sanitary, telegraph, television, radio and telecom — so plenty of bills you think of as utilities will not qualify. And paying through PayPal or Venmo forfeits the bonus rate entirely, which is easy to trip over when checking out online. The practical play is to use this card at IKEA, especially on services, redeem certificates against a planned purchase that comfortably exceeds the certificate value, and let a general-purpose cash-back card handle your dining and grocery spending unless you are certain the certificates will get spent.

The math

Run $400 a month of dining through this card and you're earning about $115 a year at our conservative valuations. There's no annual fee to earn back — everything above the 1x base rate is pure upside.

Where it lands in our rankings: #3 for utilities

Store bonuses

• IKEA5x

Key benefits

• No annual fee
• No foreign transaction fees

Common questions

Does IKEA Visa Credit Card have an annual fee?

No — IKEA Visa Credit Card has no annual fee.

What does IKEA Visa Credit Card earn on dining?

3x on dining.

What rewards does IKEA Visa Credit Card earn on everything else?

1x on all other purchases, in IKEA Rewards.

How do IKEA Visa rewards get paid out?

Rewards are issued as IKEA certificates in $15 increments, 60 to 90 days after the purchases that earned them, and they can only be spent at IKEA. Each certificate has to be used in a single transaction and any leftover value is forfeited, and certificates expire, so plan a purchase larger than the certificate before you redeem. Those constraints are why SwipeCaddy values the certificates at 0.8 cents on the dollar.

Which bills count as utilities for the IKEA Visa 3% rate?

Bread Financial defines the category narrowly: electric, home-heating gas, water, sanitary, telegraph, television, radio and telecom services. Bills outside that list will not earn the 3%, so check your statement after the first cycle rather than assuming. Also note that paying any bonus-category purchase through PayPal or Venmo forfeits the bonus rate and drops you to the 1% base.

Related reading

• How we value points and miles (and why our numbers are lower than everyone else's)SwipeCaddy ranks cards by reward rate × a conservative cash value per point: 1¢ for cash back and transferable points (Chase, Amex, Citi, Capital One, Bilt), 1.1–1.3¢ for airline miles, 0.4–1.4¢ for hotel points, and 0.8–0.9¢ for store currencies. Optimistic transfer values are recorded for context but never ranked, because most people never achieve them.