Your Rewards App Is a 5% Discount,
Not Free Food

McDonald's gives you 100 points per dollar. Einstein Bros. gives you 2.

If you stopped there you would conclude McDonald's is fifty times more generous. It is not. Those two numbers cannot be compared at all, because points are an invented currency and every chain sets its own exchange rate on the way out.

It is like comparing a price in yen to a price in dollars and skipping the conversion. The earn rate is half of a fraction, printed without its denominator, in the largest type the app has.

There is only one number that means anything across programs: how much you have to spend before something is free. That number is comparable, it is knowable, and almost no chain puts it anywhere you would see it.

Same reward at every chain — one free coffee. Here is what it costs you to get there.

Same reward. The spread runs from twenty-five dollars to over a hundred.

Now look at the earn-rate column next to it. The two chains with the flashiest-sounding numbers — McDonald's at 100 points per dollar, Tim Hortons and Dunkin at 10 — are not the generous ones. Einstein Bros, at a mumbled 2 points per dollar, has the fastest ongoing earn rate on the list, matched only by Caribou at its high end. The earn rate tells you nothing. It is marketing.

Here is the conversion the apps leave out. Take the menu price of what you redeem, divide it by the points it costs, and you get the cash value of one point. Multiply that by how many points a dollar earns you, and the two invented numbers cancel out into a real one.

Read the McDonald's row against the Peet's row and the point lands. Take the small cone and a McDonald's point is worth roughly a seventieth of a Peet's point. McDonald's also hands out a hundred times as many of them. The two distortions very nearly cancel, and what comes out the other side is an ordinary single-digit discount, same as everywhere else.

One nuance on Tim Hortons, since it looks worse than it is: the iced coffee costs 620 points against 440 for brewed, which sounds like a 40% penalty. It mostly is not, because the iced drink is a more expensive drink. In percentage terms both land within half a point of each other. The points ladder is steeper; the return is the same mediocre return.

Most restaurant loyalty programs return somewhere between 4% and 12% of what you spend. That is a discount. A decent one in a couple of cases. It is not free food, and calling it "rewards" is doing a lot of work.

This is where you can genuinely beat the average, and it costs you nothing but attention.

When a program puts several items at one redemption level, they are almost never worth the same amount of money. Tiers are built on round point numbers — 1,500, 3,000, 6,000 — not on value. The chain is sorting by convenience. You are the one who has to sort by price.

McDonald's lowest tier is 1,500 points. Redeem it for a small cone and you got about $1.30 of value, which on $15 of spending is a 9% return. Redeem it for the most expensive item sitting at that same tier and you might get three times that — call it $3.90, or a 26% return. Identical points. Identical spending. Nearly triple the value.

This matters most at McDonald's, because the tier spread there is the widest of any program on this page. But the habit is free everywhere, and no program is immune to it.

The percentages above are the best case. Four standard features of these programs push the real number down, and none of them are accidents in the design.

• Points expire, and faster than you think. McDonald's points die on the first day of the month after the sixth month from when you earned them. Dunkin moved to a one-year expiration. If you visit occasionally and bank points toward a big reward, you are frequently working toward something that will vanish before you reach it — and the occasional visitor is exactly who that rule is written for.
• One reward per order. McDonald's caps it, and so does much of the industry. You cannot stack a good redemption day, which means the ceiling on any single visit is one item, no matter how many points you are sitting on.
• Channel restrictions. McDonald's earns you nothing on DoorDash or Uber Eats orders. Einstein's coffee redemption works on app and online orders but not at the counter. And several programs pay double for ordering ahead — which is the same fact stated in reverse: ordering the normal way pays half.
• They reprice without telling you. Dunkin raised redemption costs across the board, pushing a regular coffee up roughly 100 points, lattes up 50, and breakfast sandwiches from 800 to 900. Points banked at the old rate quietly bought less. Nothing stops any of these programs from doing the same on any given Tuesday, and because the points are not money, you have no recourse when they do.

That last one is worth sitting with. Every other currency on this list — dollars, gift cards, even a coupon with an expiration date — has terms the issuer cannot change after you hold it. Points do not work that way. The balance in your app is a promise the chain can rewrite at will, and the chains have started rewriting.

A 5% return is roughly what a good cash back credit card pays on restaurant spending.

The difference is that the card pays you at every restaurant, does not expire in six months, cannot be repriced by the merchant, works through delivery apps, and does not require you to hand over your name, phone number, email address and complete purchase history.

That is not an argument against loyalty apps. They are also not mutually exclusive — you can run the card and the app on the same transaction and collect both. If you are going to McDonald's twice a week regardless, take the 5%. Take the signup bonus especially, since it is frequently the best value you will ever get out of that program. Just do it knowing what it is.

The full standing-offer picture — including the chains that hand you free coffee daily with no points involved at all — is in our verified free coffee roundup. Del Taco pours one every morning before 11 for the price of a $1.69 taco, which beats every points ladder on this page by an enormous margin.

The questions people actually ask about points, answered without the marketing. Tap one to open it.

Earn rates and redemption thresholds come from each company's own site, FAQ or app. Not from coupon aggregators — which is worth saying, because while checking this we found a widely-copied article that ran two chains' figures together in a single paragraph and produced a McDonald's threshold off by a factor of three. It has been repeated across dozens of sites since, and it is still out there.

Menu prices vary by location, so every percentage on this page is illustrative and every point value is calculated from a stated example price. The spend-before-reward column is the hard number. That one does not move with your zip code.