The Costco Anywhere Visa Card by Citi is a co-branded credit card issued by Citibank. It doubles as a Costco membership card and pays tiered cashback rates based on spending category.
The card is built around gas, travel, dining, and Costco purchases. Rewards outside those categories are paid at a flat 1% rate.
What the Costco Anywhere Visa is structurally
The Costco Anywhere Visa is a Visa card underwritten by Citibank. It requires an active, paid Costco membership to apply and to keep using it.
The card combines three functions. It operates as a revolving credit line, as the cardholder’s physical Costco membership ID, and as the vehicle for a tiered cashback program.
There is no separate annual fee for the card itself. The Costco membership fee is billed independently and is not included in the card’s terms.
How the tiered cashback structure works
Cashback rates are set by purchase category, not by total spending volume. Gas purchases at Costco stations earn 5% cashback, a rate that took effect in January 2025.
Gas bought at non-Costco stations and eligible electric vehicle charging purchases earn 4% cashback. Both the 5% and 4% rates apply only to the first $7,000 in combined gas and EV charging spending each calendar year; spending above that threshold earns 1%.
Restaurant purchases and eligible travel, including bookings made through Costco Travel, earn 3% cashback with no annual cap. Purchases at Costco warehouses and Costco.com earn 2% cashback, covering categories such as groceries and electronics. Every other purchase earns 1%.
Cashback does not post to the account as it accrues. Citi totals the year’s earnings and issues them as a single “Reward Certificate” with the cardholder’s February billing statement. The certificate can be redeemed at any U.S. Costco warehouse, either applied to a purchase or exchanged for cash at the membership desk. It cannot be redeemed for cash outside a warehouse or through Citi’s online account portal. There is no minimum balance required for a certificate to be issued.
As an example of how the categories interact: a cardholder who spends $4,000 on non-Costco gas, $2,000 on restaurants, and $6,000 at Costco warehouses in a year earns $160 from gas (4% of $4,000), $60 from dining (3% of $2,000), and $120 from Costco purchases (2% of $6,000). None of these amounts is available to the cardholder until the following February’s certificate is issued.
Fees and pricing mechanics
The Costco Anywhere Visa carries no annual card fee. Costs instead come from three sources: the underlying Costco membership, interest on unpaid balances, and the timing of reward payouts.
Costco membership fees are separate from the card and are not waived or discounted for cardholders. If the membership lapses, the card stops working, since the two accounts are linked.
Like other credit cards, the Costco Anywhere Visa applies a variable annual percentage rate to any balance not paid in full by the due date. Interest charged on a carried balance can exceed the value of cashback earned in the same period.
The card does not charge a foreign transaction fee, so purchases made outside the United States are not assessed an added percentage. The annual, rather than monthly, payout of rewards also means cardholders hold earned cashback without access to it for up to twelve months after it accrues.
Limits, eligibility, and availability
Applying for the Costco Anywhere Visa requires an active Costco membership at the time of application. The card is issued only to U.S. residents and is available only within the United States.
The 5% and 4% gas and EV charging rates are capped at $7,000 in combined annual spending. Purchases beyond that cap, in those categories, drop to the base 1% rate for the remainder of the year.
The reward certificate can be redeemed only at a physical Costco warehouse in the United States. Costco operates internationally, but the Anywhere Visa program and its cashback structure are specific to the U.S. market; other countries’ Costco co-branded cards are issued by different banks under different terms.
The card is regulated under U.S. consumer credit law, including the Truth in Lending Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act, as with other Citibank-issued consumer credit products.
Costco’s separate Executive membership tier pays its own 2% annual reward on Costco and Costco.com purchases, capped yearly, independent of the card’s cashback program. A cardholder with an Executive membership can receive both rewards on the same Costco purchase, since one is a membership benefit and the other is a card benefit. Citi also issues a separate Costco Anywhere Visa Business Card with a different rewards structure for Costco Business members, which is not covered by this review.
Tradeoffs, risks, and limitations
The card’s cashback structure and membership link create several fixed constraints. A lapsed Costco membership disables the card entirely, since the two accounts cannot be separated.
The $7,000 annual cap on gas and EV charging spending limits how much of the 4-5% rate a high-mileage driver can capture before purchases revert to 1%. Restaurant and travel spending carry no such cap.
Rewards are issued once per year rather than monthly, which ties up accrued cashback value until the February statement. The certificate can only be redeemed in person at a warehouse; there is no option for direct deposit, statement credit, or online redemption.
Spending outside the card’s four elevated categories earns a flat 1%, regardless of purchase size or merchant. Interest accrued on carried balances is calculated independently of any cashback earned and is not offset by it.
