Credit card debt getting costly The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that with the Bank of Canada taking a break on rate hikes, a lot of consumers might think they have seen the worst of rising borrowing costs. The Globe's Rob Carrick writes that would not include RBC clients who carry a credit-card balance. The interest rate for most RBC credit cards is increasing to 20.99 per cent from 19.99 per cent. Other banks have already made this change on at least some of their cards. Mortgages, credit lines and loans got more expensive in the past 12 months as the BOC increased rates to fight inflation, but the rise in credit-card rates is the harshest of all. The very definition of financial stress is carrying a big credit-card debt. If you are a collector of credit-card rewards, you are complicit in all of this. More than ever, credit-card rewards are an ethical swamp where struggling households help pay for luxuries, like trips abroad, by paying double-digit interest rates. Credit-card interest rates are not actually connected to the central bank's overnight rate. Instead, they reflect a bank's calculation about how much it can squeeze out of clients to be profitable after covering fraud losses, defaults and the cost of reward programs.