There is a multitude of airlines, and with that, even more airline credit cards. Each has a rewards schedule based on dollars spent, points or miles earned, and redemption value. They all are generally structured in the same way but it can be difficult to determine under which card your dollars spent go the farthest (almost literally). At Simple. Thrifty. Living., we’re focused on finding ways to make the most of your money, so we decided to dig into the numbers behind travel credit card rewards.

First, we rounded up the most common airlines based in the United States and selected each one’s most common consumer rewards credit card. Here are the cards we used, including their overall travel reward earnings:

We found the typical number of points/miles you’d need to redeem for the most common round trip flight across the US: Los Angeles, CA to New York, NY. We then calculated how much you’d have to spend on the credit card to earn such a flight using each card’s reward earnings schedule. With the JetBlue True Blue card, for example, you earn 3x points on JetBlue purchases and 2x points on money spent at restaurants and grocery stores, so we factored this into our calculations.*