The Amex Gold charges $325 a year. The Chase Sapphire Preferred charges $95. If you stopped reading there, you'd pick the Sapphire Preferred and probably leave a few hundred dollars on the table — or you'd pick it and be exactly right. Which one depends almost entirely on how much you spend at restaurants and grocery stores, and whether you're the kind of person who remembers to use a $7 monthly Dunkin' credit.
Both cards got meaningful updates in 2026, so a lot of the Amex Gold vs Chase Sapphire Preferred comparisons floating around are out of date. Here's where the matchup actually stands now.
| Category | Amex Gold | Chase Sapphire Preferred |
|---|---|---|
| Annual fee | $325 | $95 |
| Restaurants / dining | 4X points (up to $50k/yr) | 3X points |
| Groceries | 4X at U.S. supermarkets (up to $25k/yr) | 3X online groceries only |
| Flights & hotels | 3X flights direct, 5X prepaid hotels via Amex Travel | 5X via Chase Travel, 2X other travel |
| Gas, streaming, vacation rentals | 1X | 3X |
| Everything else | 1X | 1X |
| Annual credits | Up to $424, spread across monthly caps | $100 hotel credit, no tracking needed |
| Portal redemption value | 1.0 cent/point | 1.25 cents/point |
| Regular APR (variable) | 23.99% | 23.37% |
| Foreign transaction fee | $0 | $0 |
| Welcome offer | 100,000 points after $8,000 in 6 months | 100,000 points after $5,000 in 3 months |
Two things jump out. The Gold wins food by a wide margin and loses nearly everything else. And the Sapphire Preferred's 3X grocery rate applies to online orders only — it excludes Target, Walmart, and warehouse clubs. If you push a cart through a Kroger every week, that spending earns 1X on the Chase card and 4X on the Amex.
What the earning gap is actually worth
Rate tables are abstract until you put a budget behind them. Take a realistic household: $500 a month on dining, $500 on groceries, $200 on gas, and $3,000 a year in flights.
On the Amex Gold, that's 24,000 points from dining, another 24,000 from groceries, 9,000 from flights, and a token 2,400 from gas — about 59,400 points a year. Run the same spending through the Sapphire Preferred and you get 18,000 from dining, just 6,000 from in-store groceries, 6,000 from flights, and 7,200 from gas, or roughly 37,200 points.
That's a 22,200-point gap in the Gold's favor, worth about $222 at a penny a point. But the gap has to cover a $230 difference in annual fees, so on raw earning the two cards land almost exactly even. The decision gets made somewhere else.
The annual fee math is closer than it looks
The Amex Gold's $325 fee comes with up to $424 in annual statement credits: $120 in Uber Cash at $10 a month, a $120 dining credit at $10 a month with partners including Grubhub, Five Guys, The Cheesecake Factory, and newly added Buffalo Wild Wings and Wonder, up to $100 in Resy restaurant credits split across the two halves of the year, and $84 at Dunkin' at $7 a month. There's also a limited-time credit of up to $96 toward an Uber One membership through October 30, 2026.
On paper that's $99 of profit before you spend a dollar. In practice those credits are monthly, capped, and require enrollment in the benefits portal first — nothing accrues automatically, and a $10 Uber credit you don't use in January doesn't roll into February. Capture $250 of the $424 and your effective fee is $75. Capture $150 because you don't take Ubers and don't like Dunkin', and it's $175. Ignore them entirely and you're paying full freight.
The Sapphire Preferred plays a simpler game. Its $100 Chase Travel hotel credit — doubled from $50 in the 2026 refresh — more than covers the $95 fee with one hotel booking a year. Add a $120 credit toward Global Entry or TSA PreCheck every four years, DashPass, and a complimentary year of Apple TV worth about $156 if you activate by December 31, 2026, and the card is effectively free to hold. Nothing to babysit.
That's the honest framing: the Gold gives you more value but demands more attention. If you're weighing whether perks justify price on any premium card, we broke that down further in our look at the Sapphire Preferred against the $795 Sapphire Reserve.
Where the points actually go
Chase points are worth 1.25 cents each through the Chase Travel portal, so 60,000 points is a flat $750 in travel with no award availability to hunt. Amex Membership Rewards redeem at 1 cent through Amex Travel, and about 0.6 cents as a statement credit — a bad deal you should avoid.
Both transfer 1:1 to airline partners, which is where points get interesting. Amex has the deeper bench for international premium cabins. Chase had the single best sweet spot in the business, World of Hyatt at 1:1, and it's being cut: starting October 1, 2026, transfers move to a 4:3 ratio, so 10,000 Chase points become 7,500 Hyatt points instead of 10,000. Existing cardholders keep the old rate through September 30. If Hyatt redemptions were your plan, that's a 25% haircut.
The Sapphire Preferred also carries better protections — trip cancellation and interruption coverage, plus primary rental car coverage that pays before your own auto insurance. The Gold's are thinner.
Who should get which
| Get the Amex Gold if… | Get the Sapphire Preferred if… |
|---|---|
| You spend $400+/month on dining and groceries | Your spending spreads across travel, gas, and streaming |
| You shop at physical supermarkets | You buy groceries at Target, Walmart, or Costco |
| Uber and Resy restaurants are part of your routine | You'd rather not track monthly credits |
| You redeem via airline transfer partners | You like the certainty of 1.25 cents in the portal |
| Premium-cabin international travel is the goal | You want trip protections and primary rental coverage |
Watch the welcome offers too — both are elevated right now, and a single year's bonus can dwarf several years of category earning. Keep Chase's 5/24 rule in mind: if you've opened five or more cards across all issuers in the past 24 months, Chase will likely decline you regardless of your credit score.
And there's a third answer worth naming. These two don't really compete so much as complement each other — the Gold on food, the Sapphire Preferred on travel, gas, and portal bookings. Running both costs $420 in fees against roughly $524 in credits, which is how a lot of experienced points people actually do it. If that appeals, start with our guide to building a two-card wallet before you apply for anything.
Whichever way you go, do one thing first: pull up three months of statements and add up what you actually spent on restaurants and groceries. Not what you think you spent. The right card falls out of that number in about five minutes.