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A CARD REWARDS SCENARIO

Freedom Flex or Unlimited: model a quarter of cash back.

Enter your planned quarterly-category and ordinary purchases to compare Freedom Flex’s activated 5% cap with Freedom Unlimited’s 1.5% base rate.

One-quarter scenario, reviewed . This estimates ordinary cash-back rewards for purchases that would otherwise earn each card's base rate. It excludes welcome bonuses, borrowing costs and special merchant categories. Chase decides category coding, activation and actual rewards. Freedom Flex terms ↗ · Freedom Unlimited terms ↗
EXAMPLE QUARTER$30.00

Estimated Flex advantage in the example below. Enter your own eligible amounts to compare.

A quarter where activation matters.

Suppose you already planned $1,000.00 in purchases that qualify for an activated Flex rotating category and $1,000.00 in other base-rate purchases. With none of the $1,500.00 quarterly cap used, the modeled Flex rewards are $60.00: 5% on the first bucket and 1% on the second. The modeled Unlimited rewards are $30.00 at 1.5% on both buckets. That leaves $30.00 more from Flex in this narrow quarter. Both calculations leave out the separate welcome bonuses.

If you miss activation or already used the full rotating-category cap, Flex's modeled base rate falls to 1% for these purchases. Under the same two $1,000.00 buckets, that would be $20.00 versus $30.00 with Unlimited. The answer depends on your actual eligible categories and cap remaining, not the card's headline percentage.

How the estimate works.

Activated Flex: 5% of qualifying rotating purchases up to the remaining $1,500.00 combined quarterly cap, then 1% on the rest of the entered purchases. Without activation, all entered purchases use Flex's modeled 1% base rate. Unlimited: 1.5% of all entered base-rate purchases. The displayed difference is Flex minus Unlimited, rounded to cents.

Do not enter the same transaction in both boxes. These buckets deliberately exclude dining, drugstores and Chase Travel, where the two cards advertise separate rates, and any quarterly category that overlaps them. Merchant coding, refunds, reward adjustments, a different application offer and the accepted card agreement can change your real result. The tool does not account for interest, fees, credit approval or whether you qualify for a welcome reward. Values stay in your browser and are not saved.

Compare the welcome offers separately.

These ongoing reward rates should not decide whether a new-cardmember bonus fits your budget or history. Read the current Freedom Flex steps and exclusions ↗ and Freedom Unlimited steps and exclusions ↗, then check your ordinary spending against our welcome-bonus spending planner ↗. The official issuer offer you accept controls.

Rates and examples were checked against the two Flex and Unlimited issuer pages on September 15, 2026. Send a correction to hello@bonusfield.com.