MetaMask Card Fees: What You Actually Pay
MetaMask Card spends directly from a self-custody wallet, which moves the costs around compared with a card funded from an exchange balance. Here is what you pay, including the parts that are not on the pricing page.
Two tiers, two fee structures
As of publication there are two versions. The virtual card has no annual fee, is listed at 1% cashback, and charges a cross-border fee of about 1% on foreign-currency purchases. The metal card is listed at $199 per year, pays 3% cashback on the first $10,000 of annual spending and 1% after that, and drops the foreign transaction fee to zero.
That is the entire published fee schedule. Everything else that affects what you actually pay comes from how the card works rather than from a line item.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
Two of them matter.
The first is the network spread. MetaMask states it adds no FX margin of its own, but the Mastercard rate used to convert your purchase is not the mid-market rate you see on a currency site. The gap is usually a few tenths of a percent. It applies to every foreign-currency transaction on both tiers, and it is separate from the cross-border fee the virtual card charges.
The second is gas. Because the funds stay in your wallet until the moment of payment, the card needs an on-chain spending allowance, and setting or changing that allowance is a transaction you pay for. Moving funds into the wallet costs gas too. On Linea and Base these amounts are small — cents rather than dollars — but they scale with how often you adjust your limit, not with how much you spend.
Cashback arrives as mUSD, not currency
Rewards are paid on-chain in mUSD, a stablecoin. That is worth understanding before comparing the headline rate against a conventional card. You can hold it, swap it or spend it again, but converting it into bank currency is a separate step with its own cost, and holding a stablecoin carries issuer risk that a statement credit does not.
Whether that matters depends on what you intended to do with the money. If you were going to hold stablecoins anyway, the friction is close to zero. If you wanted cash in a bank account, count the exit cost before comparing rates.
The metal card breaks even at roughly $10,000 of annual spending
The arithmetic is simple. The metal tier's advantage over the free tier is two extra percentage points of cashback on the first $10,000 of annual spending — $200, against a $199 annual fee. On cashback alone you therefore need to put roughly $10,000 a year through the card before the metal version breaks even, and past $10,000 both tiers earn the same 1%.
Foreign spending moves that line. Every $1,000 spent abroad avoids about $10 in cross-border fees on the metal tier, so someone who travels often reaches breakeven considerably sooner. Someone who spends domestically and under $10,000 a year is better served by the free virtual card.
Crypto card terms change often, and the figures above are as listed at publication. The values we currently track for this card are on its MetaMask Card page, next to the rest of the comparison.