Mastercard® Gold Card™ review: An overpriced status symbol

The Mastercard Gold is a luxury status symbol. You’ll want it if you prefer luxury benefits while traveling, as its perks are one of its main selling points.

Perks: Luxurious features to travel in style

The Mastercard Gold’s portfolio of benefits offers much more value than the card’s rewards program if you take advantage of the travel perks. While it still doesn’t measure up to other premium travel cards, especially considering the much higher annual fee, the benefits are the card's main selling point.

The Mastercard Gold’s offerings are geared toward providing luxury while traveling. You can improve your airport experience with credit towards either Global Entry or TSA Precheck, Priority Pass lounge access and an annual airfare credit that is easy to use and covers a wide range of expenses. 

The luxury perks don’t end once you arrive at your destination. You’ll have 24/7 access to concierge services that can help secure high-demand reservations or events, arrange various services or make recommendations about how to enjoy your experience to the fullest. If you book through the Luxury Card Travel program, you can get additional value with room upgrades, daily breakfast for two, late checkout and other unique property amenities. You can also access Mastercard Priceless experiences, such as Priceless Golf, which gives you access to over 1,000 private country clubs in North America.

The Mastercard Gold comes with an excellent set of travel protections, which include trip cancellation and interruption, baggage delay and travel accident insurance, car rental collision insurance and other travel assistance services. You’ll also have cellphone protection for damage or theft. The coverage amounts on this card are on par with other top-of-the-line travel cards. While you hope never to use these benefits, they can save a trip when issues arise. 

You’ll also get some of the best standard Mastercard benefits. Mastercard offers solid ID theft and fraud protection, as well as the usual World Elite offerings, which include:

• Complimentary ShopRunner membership
• $5 monthly Lyft credit after taking three rides in a month
• Two complimentary months of Instacart+ and $10 off your second order each month
• $3 monthly statement credit for Peacock or $5 monthly statement credit for Peacock Premium Plus

Status symbol: Look like a heavy hitter

If you like making a flashy display, this card is for you. It’s the living picture of a status symbol — a 24K gold-plated stainless steel credit card that weighs in at a hefty 22g (four more grams than other premium cards like The Platinum Card® from American Express). If you think the sound and appearance of dropping one of the best metal cards is awe-inspiring, imagine how much more of a show dropping this card will make.

While the Mastercard Gold Card isn’t as rewarding or challenging to attain as legendary cards like the American Express Centurion Card or as glamorous as the diamond-encrusted and palladium-lined credit cards for the uber-wealthy, it should suffice if you’re looking to make a splash.

Many credit cards beat the Mastercard Gold card for various reasons, whether earning better rewards, charging lower fees or offering a welcome bonus. Consider brand-specific travel cards like hotel credit cards or cards for your favorite airlines that may earn more and better serve your specific travel needs.

Rewards: Weak earnings and limited redemptions

Though the Gold Card touts a better redemption rate than the Chase Sapphire Reserve® card’s 50 percent redemption boost for travel booked through Chase Travel℠,  its rewards are less flexible and valuable overall.

You earn unlimited 1X points on all purchases. This is relatively low, considering you can earn more with no-annual-fee cards. 100 Mastercard Gold Card points equal $1 when you redeem for a car rental or hotel stay, for a value of 1 cent. But when redeeming for airfare or cash back, your points are worth 2 cents each. All travel must be reserved through InComm InCentives on myluxurycard.com (or by calling the customer service number on the back of your card). There aren’t any transfer partners or any other way to get extra value from your points, which is quite a limiting factor.

Your point value also may vary depending if you redeem for gift cards or merchandise. Note that you’ll lose any points earned that month if you fail to make a minimum payment online. 

In contrast, rewards programs like Chase’s offer additional point value with various transfer travel partners. Based on Bankrate’s valuations, Chase Ultimate Rewards points can reach a market value of 2 cents per point because of excellent transfer partner deals. By comparison, Mastercard Gold Card travel experience opportunities are restricted to select experiences that may rotate, and there are only 3,000-plus properties, which falls short of Chase’s offerings by a wide margin.

Rates and fees: Extremely high annual fees

Since the Mastercard Gold’s point values are slightly below Amex Membership Rewards and Chase Ultimate Rewards, the most significant sticking point is the extremely high $995 annual fee. You’d need to spend a whopping $4,146 monthly — or $49,750 per year — and always redeem at the 2 percent value just to break even. If you’re considering adding an authorized user to help earn more rewards, that's another $295 annual fee per user. These are some of the highest overall fees on the market. Other premium travel cards have much lower annual fees and meet or exceed the overall value of the Mastercard Gold card.

The other rates and fees are standard if the high membership cost doesn’t dissuade you. Like any decent travel card, there are no foreign transaction fees. And you’ll get some help if you need to pay off another card with a respectable 0 percent intro APR for 15 billing cycles on balance transfers made within the first 45 days (21.24% to 29.24% variable APR after that, with a balance transfer fee of 5 percent or $5, whichever is greater). There isn’t a similar purchase offer, but the ongoing APR is comparable with the current average interest rate.

Welcome offer: No additional value other than debt consolidation

The Mastercard Gold Card doesn’t offer a sign-up bonus in the form of points or an intro APR on purchases, which doesn’t make the staggering price tag any easier. While the intro APR on balance transfers is decent, it seems out of character for this card. Debt consolidation likely wouldn’t be a priority if you are considering this card. 

A welcome offer would add significant value to this card, especially given the mediocre rewards earning rates. Other premium travel cards offer generous welcome offers to entice applicants by providing a straightforward way to offset the annual fee in the first year.

The Mastercard Gold Card’s value is measured primarily by its entry cost. The rewards rates are mediocre at best, so the deciding factor with this card will be how you utilize its travel benefits. Other options might provide more rewards and benefits if you're considering more attainable cards.

The Mastercard Gold card is intended for people seeking a luxury travel experience or seeking a certain level of status with this card.

If you want to experience the world of luxury travel but rewards and money-saving perks are still a priority, then it might be hard to justify the Mastercard Gold Card’s $995 annual fee.

But if you’re in the market for a card that will let you feel like a member of the rich and famous, the Mastercard Gold could suit you until you get an exclusive invitation to a more impressive luxury card.

We rate credit cards using a proprietary card scoring system that ranks each card’s estimated average rewards rate, estimated annual earnings, welcome bonus value, APR, fees, perks and more against those of other cards in its primary category.

Each card feature is assigned a weighting based on how important it is to people looking for a card in a given category. These features are then scored based on how they rank relative to the features on other cards in the category. Based on these calculations, each card receives an overall rating of 1-5 stars (with 5 being the highest possible score and 1 being the lowest). 

We analyzed over 150 of the most popular rewards and cash back cards to determine where each stacked up based on their value, cost, benefits and more. Here are some of the key factors that influenced this card’s overall score and how the score influenced our review: