Discover Student - Discover Bank

Discover Student is issued by Discover Bank. The issuer publishes a purchase APR of 16.74%–25.74% and no annual fee.

What this card is

A student card, underwritten for people with little or no credit history. Limits start low and the rate is rarely the selling point.

What the rate costs

Put a number on it: carry $1,000 on this card for a year at 25.74% and the interest comes to about $257, roughly $21 a month. That is simple interest on a flat balance, so read it as a scale rather than a bill — real interest compounds daily and moves with what you owe.

The introductory offer

There is a 0% introductory rate on purchases for 6 months. An intro rate is a real saving and a deadline at the same time: the balance does not clear itself when the period ends, and whatever is left begins accruing at the ongoing rate.

The fees

There is no annual fee.

What the issuer does not publish

Discover Bank does not publish the foreign transaction fee and the late payment fee on the page where this card appears. We have not filled those gaps with typical figures, because a plausible number is indistinguishable from a real one once it is printed beside a card.

The rates and fees for any card are disclosed in full before you submit an application, and the issuer has to give them to you then. If you want them beforehand, the issuer's cardholder agreements filed with the CFPB are linked on this page.

In short

A student card with no annual fee and a published rate of 16.74%–25.74%. Whether that rate matters to you turns on one thing: clear the statement balance every month and you will never be charged it.

The card name, the image and the application link on this page were read from Discover Bank's own website (product page). The rates and fees, where we show them, come from a different source entirely: the cardholder agreement the issuer filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Those two sources can disagree, and when they do the issuer's current offer is the one you would actually get. A filed agreement is a snapshot of the terms at the moment of filing; it is the best public record of what a card costs and it is not a quote. Read Discover Bank's current disclosure before you apply.

We join a filing to a product only when the names match on every meaningful word. Issuers file documents, not cards, so a great many filings cannot be tied to any one product — and an agreement attached to the wrong card would misstate the price of borrowing money. Those unmatched documents no longer get pages of their own on this site: a page named after a PDF is not something a reader can use. They remain published as documents, linked from this page and from the issuer's. How we read the filings.