Amex Gold Review
The Amex Gold is a potential no-net fee card with fantastic earning rates on dining, groceries, and flights, but its high fee and complicated statement credits may make it difficult to manage for those with several credit cards in their wallets.
Overall
The Amex Gold is an incredibly powerful card for accumulating points. Earning 4 Membership Rewards points for every dollar spent at restaurants and U.S. supermarkets, you can subsidize a lot of travel by whipping out this card anytime you pay for food. Its hefty $325 annual fee is offset by $424 worth of statement credits and Uber cash, although this amount comes from small monthly credits, including at merchants you may not use regularly, like Dunkin. The amount of attention and care you need to ensure you break even on the annual fee will depend on where you live and your typical spending habits, and may be easier to manage if you only have a few cards. Even if you can manage the annual fee, it may be tough to swallow if you also have other cards in your wallet–like the Amex Platinum or Capital One Venture X–that can drain hundreds of dollars from your bank account when the annual fees come due.
Still, as a no-net fee card and powerhouse earner with excellent customer service and consumer protections, the Amex Gold remains one of the best cards on the market on its own terms.
Quick ratings
🥇Great card
💸Earner
🆓No net fee (potentially)
🤓: Points nerd card
🛡️Travel protections
🔒Shopping protections
✈️Great redemptions
Bonus
The standard bonus on this card is 60,000 points (usually after spending $6,000 in the first 6 months of card membership).
The best I have seen was a referral offer I had in early 2023, offering my friends 90,000 points plus a $200 statement credit after meeting the minimum spend. I have had referral offers as high as 100k + $100 back in credits for restaurant spending, and I have seen people receive that offer with a direct mail pre-approval offer. I have also heard that people can sometimes get a 90,000-point offer via Cardmatch. The card’s 2024 refresh came with a 60,000-point bonus plus up to $100 back in statement credits for restaurant purchases.
Note that having a Gold Card can make it harder to get the maximum public on the Platinum Card (typical offers on that card for Amex customers are 100k points, compared to 150-175k for new customers applying via Cardmatch or the odd public offer). On the other hand, if you hold the Platinum Card, you might not be eligible for an offer on the Gold Card.
Especially with the new restrictions and increased annual fee, I would recommend waiting until you get a 90k-point offer before signing up for this card, especially with so many other excellent dining cards on the market (like the no-fee Bilt Mastercard). But with the public offer almost never topping 60k, you won’t have to feel bad about accepting that offer if the card makes sense for you.
Net fee
Annual fee:
$325
Credits and offsets:
$424
Uber Cash: $120 ($10/month, no carry-over)*
Dining Credit: $120 ($10/month, no carry-over)
Resy Credit: $100 ($50 semi-annually, no carry-over)
Dunkin Credit: $84 ($7/month, no carry-over)
Typical net annual fee:
$-50 to $50
*If your charges exceed your Uber Cash balance, you must use an Amex card to for the Uber Cash to be applied.
Laziness rating
⭐⭐
The earning structure on this card is quite simple: if it’s food (restaurants or U.S. supermarkets), you’ll get bonus points. As a card to physically keep in your wallet, it’s extremely easy to know when to use it.
However, its credits can potentially be very high maintenance. When I lived in DC, I got full value from my dining and Uber credits without even thinking. Uber trips, Uber Eats, Grubhub orders, and trips to the various dining credit restaurants were part of my pre-existing routine and budget, so the credits were automatic. Now that I live in a slightly more suburban area, however, it takes a little more planning to make sure the takeout I order flows through both Uber Eats and Grubhub at least once each month. Resy restaurants are also few and far between where I live (and expensive), so it would take a fair bit of planning and organization to make sure I got full value from the credits. After all, if you spend $80 to get a $50 credit at a restaurant you wouldn’t have eaten at anyway, the value of the credit is probably closer to negative $30 than to $50.
The points, though valuable, are likewise relatively labor-intensive. The only “easy” option is to redeem them for flights on Amex Travel for 1¢ each. Although you can get much more value by relatively simple transfers to Delta, or more exotic transfers to programs like Flying Blue, All Nippon Airways, or Virgin, this takes a decent amount of effort, especially compared to programs like Bilt and Chase whose points can be redeemed simply through their travel portals for solid values, or Capital One, whose points can erase travel purchases with a simple in-app swipe. However, if you invest in a service like Thrifty Traveler, it can be much easier to find high-value redemptions. With Thrifty Traveler, I have been able to book several deals with Amex points, such as 50k Delta Skymiles to Rome.
Earning
4x: Dining (up to $50,000 per year)
4x: U.S. grocery stores (up to $25,000 per year)
3x: Airfare (booked directly with the airline or Amex)
2x: Eligible travel on AmexTravel.com (including prepaid hotels and car rentals)
1x: All other purchases
Perks
Receive a $100 property credit when booking a 2+ night stay with The Hotel Collection
Point.me Partnership to search reward flights with transfer partners
Protections
No foreign transaction fees ✅
Trip Delay Insurance ($300 per trip delayed by 12+ hours) ✅
Trip Cancellation/Interruption Insurance 🚫
Baggage Insurance ($1,250 carry-ons, $500 checked bags, per person) ✅
Baggage Delay Insurance 🚫
Rental Car Insurance ✅
Purchase Protection ✅
Return Protection 🚫
Extended Warranty ✅
Cell Phone Insurance 🚫
Travel Accident Insurance 🚫
Hacks
Grubhub. One of the eligible merchants for the $10 monthly dining credit is Grubhub. This means you can get $10 back on takeout or delivery through that service each month. To get even more value, you can usually get an additional 1% back from the shopping portal Rakuten. If you have Amazon Prime, you can also take advantage of $0 delivery and 5% back on pickup with free Grubhub+. Alternatively, if you don’t have Prime, you could use the $10 credit to pay for Grubhub+.
Uber Eats pickup. The monthly cash can be used for Uber rides and Uber Eats delivery, but you might not need rideshare every month, and Uber delivery fees can quickly eat into the value of that Uber cash. Ordering pickup via Uber Eats can help you get value from your Uber Cash every month.
Dunkin and Resy credits. TPG reports that you may be able to trigger the Resy credit by buying a gift card at a qualifying restaurant, depending on how the payment is processed. Similarly, you might be able to use the Dunkin credit for Baskin-Robbins (owned by Dunkin), most likely if the stores are co-located or if you pay via the Dunkin app.
Points/Rewards
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Travel portal redemption rate: 1¢/pt on flights
Best statement credit redemption: n/a (erase purchases at 0.6¢/pt)
Domestic Airline Partners: Delta, Hawaiian, JetBlue
Other key partners: Avios (British Airways and others), Air Canada, ANA, Avianca, Flying Blue (Air France, KLM, and others), Turkish Airlines, Virgin Atlantic.
Although they require some care to redeem for good, let alone maximum, value, Membership Rewards points are among the best, having access to several domestic partners for relatively simple ways to redeem for solid value on domestic flights, along with the deepest bench of international transfer partners available, offering a wide range of ways to use points to fly at home or abroad, in economy or in luxury.
Alternatives
The Amex Gold is the best card for dining out, but there are a lot of contenders for second place. These include the Bilt Mastercard, Chase Sapphire Preferred and Reserve, Citi Premier, and Wells Fargo Autograph Journey, all earning 3 points per dollar.
Of these, the Bilt card offers a no-fee alternative. It offers double points on travel and offers trip cancellation and cell phone insurance, but lacks the Gold’s baggage insurance, return protection, and extended warranty on purchased goods.
The Capital One Savor also offers 3x on dining with no fee, and can allow you to pool Capital One miles between the Savor and a Venture X for a powerful one-two punch. Although the points are less valuable, they are much easier to redeem and the fee and credit structure is much simpler.
The Chase Sapphire Preferred offers a more well-rounded range of bonus points, earning 3x on dining, online grocery purchases, and streaming, double points on travel, as well as a 10% bonus on base points on renewal (e.g. 2k bonus points on $20k of spending). It also offers baggage delay and trip cancellation insurance. It also offers a lower annual fee, but no way to offset that fee completely with credits.
Card pairings
Pair the Gold with the Amex Platinum for luxury perks, 5x points on flights, and greater protections on day-to-day shopping and travel.
Pair it with the Capital One Venture X for the latter’s premium shopping and travel protections, concierge service, and lounge access. You’ll also have an easy-to-remember credit card strategy: 4x on food (dining/US supermarkets) with the Gold, 2x on all purchases with the Venture X.
Pair it with a Delta co-branded card to take full advantage of the Delta-Amex partnership, including the 15% discount available with those cards and earn Medallion Qualification Dollars towards elite status when redeeming miles on award flights. You can also get elite-like status perks with Delta’s higher-end Amex cards, like the Delta Platinum. Add a subscription to Thrifty Traveler to make high-value redemptions easy.
Conclusion
At its best, the Amex Gold is the best way to earn a ton of valuable Membership Rewards points by eating out and grocery shopping, two major spending categories for a lot of people. With $424 in credits to offset the $325 annual fee, it is possible not only to break even on the annual fee, but even come out ahead, making it a worthwhile investment for point maximization for those who can make those credits work.
At its worst, the Amex Gold is a high-cost, high-maintenance card that requires care and attention to come out ahead on given the difficulty in using all the statement credits or maximizing value on the points.
Ultimately, for points nerds and those whose spending maps neatly onto the card’s statement credits, the Gold Card remains one of the best cards on the market.