Best Credit Cards for College Students

For young people, getting a credit card is no longer as easy as walking up to a booth advertising free t-shirts or some other branded trinket and filling out some basic personal information. Now, with the passage of the CARD Act, college students must either have co-signers or be able to list on student credit card applications that they have the income or assets necessary to at least make a credit card’s monthly minimum payments—which, in most cases, will be 3% of the balances they rack up. And while nervous parents, with thoughts of free-t-shirt-wielding, wild-spending teens swirling through their heads, might see this as a positive development—and it is in certain respects—young people still need to begin building credit, and using a credit card for college students remains the most efficient way to do so.

Having an open credit card in good standing results both in positive information being relayed to one’s three major credit files (Experian, TransUnion and Exquifax) on a monthly basis and a solid track record of responsible use emerging over time. Without this track record and the accompanying solid credit score, lenders, creditors and even employers won’t have reason to trust someone, let alone offer him attractive rates or jobs where a security clearance or the ability to handle money is required. As a result, students need to find a way to meet the new requirements, open a credit card and pay its bill on time every single month.

But what is the best credit for a college student? Even with the new restrictions, there are a wide variety of credit cards for college students on the market and deciding which one to get can be difficult.

The first thing you need to do is limit your search to only no annual fee credit cards. A student’s top priority in using a credit card is credit building, after all, and most college students have limited budgets, so the best student credit cards are those that are essentially free to maintain. Other characteristics are secondary and depend on a student’s individual needs. Students who will pay their bills in full every month should focus on rewards, while those who will need a bit more time to pay off large purchases should gravitate toward 0% APR student credit cards, and the subset of the student population that currently has credit card debt should look to minimize its cost with a student balance transfer credit card. With this in mind, and after reviewing our database of over 1,000 credit card offers, we have deemed the following credit cards to be the best for college students:

While building a solid credit score begins with opening one of the aforementioned best credit cards for students, it may or may not end there. After opening their cards, students have two choices: always pay their bills on time (and in full whenever possible) or lock the cards away unused.

“While many people assume that credit building necessitates actual use of a credit card, that’s not necessarily the case,” says Odysseas Papadimitriou, founder and CEO of CardHub.com. “Making purchases, staying well below one’s credit limit and submitting on-time payments will provide the most marked results, but positive information will be relayed to one’s major credit reports each month even if he doesn’t use the card to buy anything, simply by virtue of the fact that he has an open credit card in good standing. So, as a general rule of thumb, if you don’t trust yourself to spend responsibly with a credit card, don’t spend with one at all. You’ll still accomplish your primary objective in having a credit card at this stage in your life and you won’t put yourself at a disadvantage by incurring credit card debt or damaging your credit.”

Therefore, for those students who have yet to open their first credit card, back-to-school shopping isn’t over just yet.