Capital on Tap cashback calculator: points, cash and Avios from your spend

Skip straight to the calculator if you already know how the points work. The rest of this page explains what the tool assumes, so you can judge how far to trust the answer.

How the maths works

The free card earns 1 point per £1 on card spend, and 1 point = 1p (1,000 points = £10). That is the whole of the 1% cashback claim. Put £5,000 a month on the card and you earn 60,000 points in a year, worth £600 if you take them as cash or as a credit against your balance. The calculator multiplies your monthly figure by twelve and applies that rate, nothing cleverer.

Pro is where the maths gets interesting, because it does not raise the rate on ordinary spend. Capital on Tap’s Pro page describes 1% on ordinary credit spend, same as the free card, with the higher 1.25% on preloaded spend (and Daily Repay via Smart Repay). So the calculator asks for two figures: your monthly credit spend, which earns 1% on both cards, and your monthly preloaded or Daily Repay spend, which earns 1% on the free card and the boosted rate on Pro. It then deducts the £299 a year fee from Pro’s total.

Two one-off bonuses can sit on top in year one. The referral bonus, 7,500 points or £75 against your balance, goes to both the referrer and the new customer when a brand-new customer applies through a referral link and transacts within 30 days of activating the card; it applies whichever tier you pick, so it does not change the verdict, but it changes the totals. Pro also has its own welcome bonus, 10,000 bonus points when you spend £5,000 in the first 3 months, which the calculator adds only when your combined monthly spend is at least £1,667, and only if you have never had a sign-up bonus before. The full detail of how the referral works, and why it sometimes does not arrive, is on the referral code page.

Assumptions and what the calculator ignores

The tool assumes every pound you enter earns points. In practice it will not quite. The rewards terms say each transaction is each transaction rounded down to the nearest pound, so a run of £4.99 app subscriptions earns 4 points each, not 5; across a year of small payments that shaves a little off. No points on cash withdrawals or fees, and points are cancelled on refunded purchases. Bill Pay payments earn points only on the 2% fee option, and the fee outweighs them, so that spend should not be in your figure at all; the HMRC and suppliers guide covers when Bill Pay makes sense.

It assumes you pay the statement in full every month. Interest on a carried balance would swamp 1% cashback within weeks, and Capital on Tap does not publish a representative APR, so we cannot model it honestly. If you sometimes carry a balance, read how to avoid business credit card interest first; the cashback only makes sense once that is solved. The fees and APR page lists every other charge.

It also assumes you redeem. Points expire after 24 months with no earning or redeeming, cash redemptions need a £10 minimum for cash to a bank account, and points can be lost if you are more than 14 days late. None of that is a problem if you use the card normally, but the calculator cannot see your habits.

The Avios note

Points convert to Avios (and Virgin Points and Radisson Rewards) instead of cash, and here the two tiers really do differ. Capital on Tap’s FAQ gives 10 points = 8 Avios on the free card and 10 points = 10 Avios on Pro. The calculator shows both. A pound of spend on the free card becomes 0.8 Avios; on Pro it becomes 1 Avios, or 1.25 on preloaded spend.

What an Avios is worth is not a Capital on Tap figure and the tool does not pretend otherwise. The “Avios view” line values them at about 1p each, the ball-park Head for Points uses, and asks whether Pro’s extra Avios cover the fee on their own. At that valuation an Avios is worth the same as a point, so converting on the free card gives up 20% of your value and converting on Pro gives up nothing; whether you get more than 1p depends entirely on how you redeem. The Avios for business spend guide goes into the redemptions, the Amex alternatives and the tax question.

Pro caveats

The calculator labels the Pro rate “as reported by Capital on Tap; your portal shows your rate” for a reason. The rewards terms call the higher rate a Boosted Rate and say the rate that applies to you is the one shown in your portal. The public Pro page says 1.25% on preloaded spend (and Daily Repay via Smart Repay); the FAQ extends that to Daily Repay through Smart Repay. We have not seen a Pro account ourselves, so we quote the published figure and flag it.

The other Pro benefits are outside the maths: unlimited Priority Pass lounge access for the main cardholder, two free guest passes a year, then £30 per guest per visit, a metal card, and Times digital subscription, Radisson Rewards VIP, Go Privilege Silver and priority support. Capital on Tap says Capital on Tap values Priority Pass at £467 a year; that is its valuation, and it is worth exactly what you would otherwise have paid for lounge access, which for many small businesses is nothing. If you fly often, add it back in your head. The Pro page weighs those perks properly.

Pro is billed annually, so the fee is a sunk cost on day one. The welcome bonus is a genuine one-off that only new customers get, which is why the calculator separates year one from the years after it: a card that looks marginally ahead in year one because of a £100 bonus can be comfortably behind from year two.

Break-even, two ways

There are two honest ways to state the Pro break-even and they give very different numbers, so the calculator shows both and says whose each is.

Capital on Tap’s framing: the Pro page says you cover the fee with £23,920 of preloaded or Daily Repay spend at 1.25%, or £29,900 of ordinary credit spend at 1%. Multiply either by its rate and you get the fee. It is arithmetic about gross cashback, and it is correct as far as it goes.

Ours: you would have earned 1% on all that spend on the free card anyway, for £0 annual fee. The only cashback Pro adds is the 0.25 percentage point uplift on preloaded or Daily Repay spend. To recover £299 a year from a 0.25% uplift you need £119,600.00 of such spend a year, roughly £9,967 a month, and ordinary credit spend never contributes because it earns the same on both cards. If your business preloads heavily, perhaps because your credit limit is lower than your spend, that figure is reachable; the credit limit page explains why limits often start low. For most businesses it is not, and Pro has to be justified by Avios or lounges instead. Before you decide, check you qualify at all with the eligibility checker, and if a chunk of your spend is in dollars or euros, the FX fee calculator may matter more than any of this.