Best cards at B&H Photo Video

Good to know at B&H Photo Video

The top of the B&H ranking belongs to a card with no ordinary earn rate at all. The B&H Payboo Card pays back the full sales tax on your order as an instant credit at checkout, so its effective return is whatever your ship-to state charges — roughly 6% to 10% where tax applies. We score it a conservative 7%, comfortably ahead of the U.S. Bank Cash+ at 5% (only if you selected the right category this quarter, and only under its cap), the Business Platinum at 2x, and the 2% pack that fills out the rest of the list. On a $3,000 camera body shipped to an 8%-tax state, the Payboo's benefit is worth $240.

The fine print is geographic and financial. The tax benefit keys off the ship-to address — the New York rate applies when you buy at the NYC SuperStore — and it is worth exactly nothing on orders shipped to Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, or Puerto Rico, where B&H collects no sales tax; a Portland photographer gets no benefit at all. The card also forces a choice at checkout between the tax credit and deferred-interest financing (6 or 12 months, currently 24 on select gear): pick financing and you forfeit the tax savings, and the decision cannot be changed after the fact. With a 35.99% APR, carrying a balance erases the benefit quickly.

If you don't carry the store card — or you ship to a no-tax state — the fallback logic mirrors every other electronics merchant. The U.S. Bank Cash+ leads at 5% if Electronics Stores is one of your selected quarterly categories and you are under the cap; otherwise reach for whichever no-annual-fee 2% card is already in your wallet rather than paying a fee for the same rate. The ranking holds across every way B&H sells — online, in the app, by phone, or at the SuperStore — so one decision covers all channels.

The math

Spend $300 a month at B&H Photo Video and B&H Payboo Card returns about $252 a year at our valuations — a flat 2% card returns $72.