How We Research UK Business Credit Card Data: Sources, Verification and Scope

What this research covers

Every figure in the datasets is tied to a UK business credit card or charge card available to incorporated businesses — limited companies and LLPs. Sole trader cards, personal consumer cards, prepaid cards, and debit-only products are outside scope and are not included in any benchmark table.

Where the data comes from

Every published figure is traced to a primary issuer document. We operate a three-tier source hierarchy:

• Tier 1 — primary issuer documentation: pre-contract summary information, full terms and conditions, application disclosures, tariff guides, and FCA Financial Services Register entries. A published claim must rest on at least one Tier 1 source.
• Tier 2 — corroborative issuer materials: issuer FAQ pages, help-centre articles, official press releases, and accounting-platform integration documentation. Used to clarify or contextualise a Tier 1 claim, never to replace it.
• Tier 3 — internal editorial records: prior research notes, analyst working papers, and our own database. These are used only as a starting point; nothing is re-published from them without fresh Tier 1 verification.

Affiliate comparison sites, price-comparison aggregators, forums, Reddit, Wikipedia, and generative-AI outputs are never accepted as sources for a structured data claim. We name the issuer document behind every row.

How we verify each claim

Every observation passes through an editorial check before it can appear in a published dataset. A researcher records the source URL, the exact quote or figure used, and the date they confirmed it. A second reviewer spot-checks the claim against the same source before the observation is released to the live datasets. Every row you see has passed both stages; the verification date printed alongside each figure is the date of the most recent source check, not the date of the build.

How fresh we keep the data

Different fields decay at different rates, so we apply different freshness thresholds. When a claim exceeds its threshold without re-verification, the card is automatically suppressed from the benchmark table rather than left in place.

• Fast-moving: representative APR, purchase rates, welcome offers — re-verified within 7 days.
• Medium-moving: eligibility criteria, personal guarantee requirements — re-verified within 14 days.
• Slow-moving: annual fees, FX fees, standard rewards earn rates — re-verified within 30 days.

What we don’t publish

This research deliberately stops short of modelling things public sources can’t support. We do not publish approval rates, acceptance likelihood, underwriting ease, or individual-business affordability estimates. These vary by applicant and are not reliably disclosed by issuers. Where an issuer’s public documentation is silent on a field, we say so rather than infer a value — see the sections below for current exclusions.

Fields not publicly disclosed by issuers

The following fields cannot be published because the issuer’s primary-source documents contain no explicit statement on this point. Aggregator sources have been assessed but not accepted without primary-source confirmation.

• Barclaycard Premium Plus Business Credit Card — personal guarantee: PRIMARY SOURCE CONFIRMED SILENT (21 Apr 2026): barclaycard
• Barclaycard Select Cashback Business Credit Card — personal guarantee: PRIMARY SOURCE CONFIRMED SILENT (21 Apr 2026): barclaycard
• HSBC Business Credit Card — personal guarantee: PRIMARY SOURCE CONFIRMED SILENT (21 Apr 2026): business