Premium-card annual fees attract attention, but how often does our own database list no annual fee? We analyzed 503 card records in CardTuned’s U.S. credit-card database, using a snapshot retrieved on October 4, 2026.
Among 473 records that passed this analysis’s database-status and fee checks, 342—72.3%—list a $0 ongoing annual fee. This describes CardTuned’s selected database records, not the share of all U.S. cards or cardholders.
What we counted—and what we left out
The Cards tab contained 503 nonempty records. We excluded 20 marked inactive or discontinued. Of the remaining 483, we excluded another 10 because the research status required rechecking, the fee varied by offer or the fee was not confirmed. That left 473 eligible records: 342 at $0 and 131 with a positive fee.
The source is CardTuned’s maintained research database. We inspected its fields and executed the calculations; we did not reverify all 473 fees against live issuer applications for this article. The included records’ stored Last Verified dates range from September 4 through October 1, 2026. Those are existing database dates, not a claim that every fee was checked on the snapshot date.
| Recorded fee band | Records | Share |
|---|---|---|
| $0 | 342 | 72.3% |
| $1–$99 | 75 | 15.9% |
| $100–$249 | 18 | 3.8% |
| $250–$499 | 21 | 4.4% |
| $500 or more | 17 | 3.6% |
| Total | 473 | 100.0% |
The median fee among the 131 positive-fee records was $99. The median across all 473 records was $0. Those figures answer different questions: one describes the middle fee among fee-charging records; the other includes the much larger zero-fee group.
Does the card mix change the headline?
| Recorded grouping | Records | $0 records | $0 share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business/commercial-labeled | 69 | 38 | 55.1% |
| Not business/commercial-labeled | 404 | 304 | 75.2% |
| Explicitly co-brand-tagged | 188 | 143 | 76.1% |
| Not co-brand-tagged | 285 | 199 | 69.8% |
Business/commercial-labeled records have a lower no-fee share: 55.1%, versus 75.2% for the remainder—a gap of about 20 percentage points. Combining them produces the overall 72.3% result. The remainder is not a fully audited consumer-only universe; it is simply the group without the labels defined below.
Removing explicitly co-brand-tagged records leaves 285 records, of which 199—or 69.8%—have no ongoing annual fee. The majority-no-fee finding therefore survives this particular exclusion. This is a sensitivity check, not de-duplication of all airline, hotel or retail product families: missing or inconsistent tags can leave related variants in the remainder.
The two splits overlap. A business card can also be co-branded, so adding all four rows would double-count the analysis set. Neither comparison establishes that a label causes a higher or lower fee.
How much do the excluded records matter?
Among all 483 records marked active, the 342 included zero-fee records represent 70.8%. If all 10 unresolved active records eventually qualified as zero-fee records, that share would be 72.9%; if none did, it would remain 70.8%. This is a simple missing-data sensitivity range, not a statistical confidence interval and not a correction for stale included rows.
Why this is not a U.S. market survey
Our database is a curated collection, not a random sample or a census. It includes different types of cards and eligibility restrictions, including business, regional, credit-union and retail products. One record gets one count; a widely held national card does not receive a larger weight than a small regional product.
Card IDs and normalized exact names were unique. Related product variants can still remain separate; the analysis did not consolidate every family or independently audit active status.
Accordingly, these results cannot establish consumer market share, approval availability, the fee paid by an average American or a trend in fee increases. A trend would require comparable historical snapshots and a consistent method, which this single snapshot does not provide.
What this snapshot adds
The useful finding is broader than one percentage: no-fee records are a majority of the eligible database, the majority remains after the co-brand-tag exclusion, and the business-labeled mix materially changes the headline share. A comparison focused on personal cards should therefore not reuse the pooled figure without explaining that mix.
These counts describe product coverage, not customer behavior. They do not measure how many people hold premium cards or whether a fee is worthwhile for a particular person. Interest, other charges and eligibility restrictions also remain outside this annual-fee distribution.
Method and reproducibility
- Select nonempty Cards rows with Active = TRUE, Research Status = Verified and Annual Fee Data Status = Confirmed. Keep unresolved records out even when the visible amount looks like $0.
- Parse the ongoing fixed fee. Seven introductory-waiver records use the later positive fee, not the temporary $0 amount. Count each unique card record once; do not weight by cardholders or merge related families.
- Mark a record business/commercial-labeled when its name or Card Type contains business, corporate, commercial or fleet, case-insensitively. Mark co-brand status only when Card Type contains co-brand. These are reproducible label rules, not issuer-by-issuer eligibility audits.
- Calculate fee bands, medians and segment shares; round percentages to one decimal place. The sensitivity range uses all 483 active records, while the main result uses 473 included records.
The accompanying data files contain the source snapshot, fee decisions, row-level segment flags and a recalculation script. They reproduce this October 4 database analysis. The stored verification dates describe the earlier research; they are not evidence that every application remains open or every fee is unchanged today.
- Download the complete reproducibility package (ZIP, 52 KB): all 503 source records, fee classifications, segment flags, the original Python recalculation script, README and checksums.
- Download the 473 included records (CSV, 69 KB).
The public snapshot preserves all study rows and calculation inputs; internal audit notes and the private spreadsheet address are omitted. The package was restored and its calculations reproduced on October 12, 2026 using the preserved October 4 snapshot.
Before valuing grocery rewards, check which purchases qualify.
