The best cheap credit cards

These credit cards all come with a low APR, meaning if you don't pay off your full balance you won't get whacked with massive interest charges.

Sometimes a credit card offering a 0% period is not the best card for you. Perhaps you have a really large balance that needs paying off, and know that you would end up moving it between a series of 0% balance transfer cards – each time paying a balance transfer fee – before you could clear it.

Or perhaps you don’t have a single large purchase on the horizon and just want to know that if you don’t manage to pay off your full balance in a single go, you won’t be whacked with a really punishing interest rate.

If that sounds like you, then you might prefer to go for a low-rate credit card.

These offer much smaller rates of interest than the 18-20% you tend to get with a normal credit card on any outstanding balance you may have.

Let’s take a look at some of the cheapest

The five cheapest credit cards

Sainsbury’s recently launched two Low Rate cards, which have gone straight to the top of the Low APR best buy table, with a representative APR of just 7.8%. Both come with extras to bear in mind too, whether cashback or extra Nectar points on your spending.

If you don’t shop at Sainsbury’s enough to make use of the added Nectar points or qualify for the cashback, you may prefer to go for the marginally higher rate of 7.9% on offer from Barclaycard with its Platinum Simplicity card.

After that comes a couple of very different cards from NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland. These Low Rate Visas actually offer a limited 0% period on purchases, for six months. They also offer an extra low rate of 2.9% on balance transfers for the first year, before the rate jumps a little.

Why you may not get the representative APR

The selling point of these cards is how low the representative APR is. However, you may not actually get that rate.

The clue is in the word representative. Lenders only have to offer this rate to 51% of successful applicants. After that, they are allowed to charge whatever they like.

And the way they will decide what rate you get will be your credit rating. If you have a less than perfect credit rating, for whatever reason, then you may end up being offered a higher rate, at which point the deal may not seem quite so compelling.

You can check your credit record thanks to a free trial at Credit Expert via Lovemoney. And if you want to improve it, read Ten simple steps to improve your credit record.

More on credit cards

The best credit cards to use on your travels

The best reward credit cards

The best 0% balance transfer credit cards

The best low-fee balance transfer credit cards

The best cashback credit cards

The best 0% purchase credit cards

Best credit cards for bad credit borrowers