Methodology & data sources

CardTerms surfaces the raw credit-card terms that issuers report to the U.S. government. This page documents exactly where the numbers come from, how we process them, and the limits you should keep in mind. Transparency is the point: every figure is either a value straight from the survey or a clearly-labelled aggregate of survey values.

Primary data source

All issuer terms come from the CFPB Terms of Credit Card Plans (TCCP) Survey — a semiannual survey the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is required by law (the Truth in Lending Act) to conduct. It collects credit-card price and availability terms from the 25 largest issuers plus a geographically distributed sample of at least 125 smaller banks and credit unions — over 150 issuers in total. The CFPB states: "Our data is public, and anyone can use it." The dataset is U.S. public domain.

The national average APR figures come from the Federal Reserve G.19 Consumer Credit (Q1 2026) (also U.S. public domain).

How we process it

• Download & parse. A script (scripts/fetch-data.mjs) downloads the official CFPB survey XLSX and parses it with a dependency-free reader, producing committed JSON that the site reads at build time. There is no live fetching when pages render.
• Aggregate to issuers. The survey has one row per card product (663 products in this release). We aggregate to one record per issuer: the surveyed purchase-APR minimum, maximum and median across that issuer's products, the per-credit-tier medians (poor / good / great) reported, intro / balance-transfer / cash-advance APRs, and typical annual and late fees. We kept the 171 issuers that reported a usable purchase APR (28 top-25 issuers, 130 credit unions).
• Units. APRs are stored in the source as decimal fractions (0.2824) and shown here as percentages (28.24%). A few obvious data-entry anomalies (e.g. an APR below 2% or above 50%) are dropped and render as a dash rather than reproduced.
• Missing data. When an issuer left a field blank in the survey, we render a dash (—) with a note — we never invent a value.
• Derived figures. The "median by issuer type" and "average by size" figures are transparent aggregates of the surveyed values above. The headline by-credit-tier medians are taken from the CFPB's own published analysis.

The calculator

The payoff calculator runs entirely in your browser using the standard monthly-compounding method: each month it adds APR/12 of the balance as interest, subtracts your payment, and repeats until the balance reaches zero. We do not store your inputs.

What this is not

These are surveyed terms, not offers. They are the terms issuers reported to the regulator, not personalized quotes. Your actual APR, fees and approval depend on your creditworthiness and the issuer's underwriting. Survey data is also a point-in-time snapshot (CFPB TCCP survey, Jul-Dec 2025) and issuers change terms frequently — always verify the current terms directly with the issuer before applying.

Data sources

Limitations

Figures may lag the underlying source or contain survey errors. Always verify against the issuer before relying on them. See our disclaimer.

Last updated: 2026-06-29