For contractors and tradespeople, the best cards are business cards tuned to trades spend — fuel, hardware, and supplies — with strong gas and warehouse-store earn, employee cards for a crew, and a limit that covers materials up front. We track 272 Canada cards.
The only Canadian business card built explicitly for the trades: Scotiabank co-designed this with Home Hardware specifically for contractors, builders, and construction entrepreneurs.
Cash back pays out once a year as a Costco gift certificate -- less flexible than a statement credit but directly reusable on the next materials run.
Best for a contractor whose fuel and incidental/office purchasing is heavier relative to big-box materials runs, since hardware-store spend itself isn't a bonus category here.
Avion points are also a flexible travel currency, useful for an owner who wants points value beyond the trades-specific redemption options of the other cards here.
It has the lowest raw earn rate of the cards researched here once the gas cap is hit, but the zero ongoing cost makes it a safe default while a new business ramps up before 'graduating' to a higher-earning fee card.
These picks come from dedicated research for contractors and tradespeople, which drew on issuers' published terms and independent sources — listed under “sources” on each pick. The order is the research's. Every fee, welcome offer and earn rate shown on a pick is the figure our catalogue holds for that card, the same one its card page shows. Nothing here is pay-to-rank. Business cards appear only on business guides, student cards only on student guides, and prepaid cards on none. A figure we do not hold is shown as “Not confirmed”, never as a zero. Each researched shortlist is marked as pending editorial review until the site's editor approves it.