Andhra Bank VISA Classic Credit Card
Cancel₹550, two lakh of cover, and a passport that ran out at Bhutan.
a year at ₹40,000 a month, after the fee
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Welcome: Nothing published — the bank advertised no joining gift, only a nil admission fee and no annual subscription in the first year
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied. Plus milestones, minus the fee. No accelerator credit — the ranking model on /compare adds ~20% of spend at the card's best accelerator, so its ₹ for this card reads higher.
How these numbers are computed — and why the rankings show a bigger one →
Spend tiers, milestones and fee waivers included, at our house ₹/point. Portal and category multipliers can push higher — run your exact number →
Breaks even only by erasing its fee at ₹2,000 a month
At ₹2,000 a month — ₹24,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹100 gross (earn ₹100) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹550 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹18,000 a year = ₹100 net — the first rung at or above ₹0. The ladder runs in ₹1,000 steps to ₹1,00,000 a month and ₹10,000 steps to ₹5,00,000; figures are rounded to the hundred, and the accelerator is never credited.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #991
Why #991 The bottom rung of Andhra Bank's own shelf — ₹550 a year, ₹2 lakh of bank-paid accident cover, and for most of its life a card that stopped at Bhutan. Carried for the record; Andhra Bank was merged into Union Bank of India on 1 April 2020.
The take
The Visa Classic was the cheapest way into Andhra Bank's own credit-card shelf, and the bank set the bar low enough to mean it: gross salary of ₹6,500 a month or ₹78,000 of annual income on the printed schedule, ₹15,000 a month or ₹1.80 lakh by the time the website caught up. Nil admission fee, ₹550 a year, ₹200 for an add-on, and by 2017 nothing at all in the first year and nothing afterwards if you spent ₹18,000 in the previous one — which for a card at this price is close to lifetime free by usage. The benefit that is actually the bank's own money is ₹2 lakh of accident insurance, with the schedule stating plainly that "the premium is paid by the Bank". That is less than half the Gold's ₹5 lakh, and it is the only published difference between the two other than the fee and the geography. The geography is the thing to know about this card. Andhra Bank's own terms of membership say it: "Visa Classic and Master Cards are valid in India, Nepal & Bhutan only." A Visa card that would not work in Singapore is an unusual object, and it stayed that way until at least the mid-2010s, when the bank's site began advertising "Global acceptance for Visa Platinum, Visa Gold, Visa Corporate, Visa Classic and Master Card" without ever saying when that changed. The rest is the shelf: 21 to 51 days of free credit, no fee for cash at Andhra Bank's own ATMs and ₹50 at anyone else's, 3% on cash advances, no transaction fee at HPCL pumps on an Andhra Bank or ICICI terminal up to ₹3,000 a day, 2.5% on railway tickets, and one reward point per ₹100 worth fifty paise through the bank's ABLE Rewards programme. No lounge, no airline, no transfer partner, ever. On 1 April 2020 Andhra Bank was amalgamated into Union Bank of India.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card reaches break-even by ERASING its fee, not by out-earning it: the waiver is the decision.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹550/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 joining, then ₹550/yr
The waiver ₹18,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹1,500 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹2,000 a month — ₹24,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee, and it gets there by erasing the fee at the waiver rather than out-earning it.
At your spend
₹1,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹6,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹18,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹30,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
Everyday earn plus milestones, minus the fee — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
Your copy of this card
You hold this card.
Kept on this device, in your browser. It is never sent to us, never synced, and nothing else on the site reads it yet.
The downgrade
Andhra Bank publishes no document naming a card you can step down to, so we name none — an invented product change is a phone call you would waste. That leaves keep or cancel, and the numbers above are the whole of it.
If you call to cancel
What the bank offers to keep you is the one fact this desk cannot compute. We are collecting those reports — dated, and only in aggregate — before publishing any: an offer one reader was made is not one you are owed. Called about this card? Tell us what they offered →
The desk publishes subscribable .ics feeds for the dates it knows — offer deadlines, devaluations, expiry audits. Your renewal date is not one of them: only your statement knows it.
What's good
- ₹2 lakh of accident insurance with the premium paid by the bank
- Nil admission fee and ₹550 a year, with an add-on at ₹200
- By 2017 the subscription was waived in the first year and afterwards on ₹18,000 of spend
- An income bar of ₹78,000 a year on the printed schedule — the lowest on the shelf
- 21 to 51 days of free credit on purchases
- No fee for cash withdrawals or balance enquiries at Andhra Bank's own ATMs and branches, and ₹50 at another bank's
- No transaction fee at HPCL pumps on an Andhra Bank or ICICI terminal up to ₹3,000 a day, against 2.50% with a ₹10 floor everywhere else
- One reward point per ₹100 at fifty paise a point through the bank's ABLE Rewards programme
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — Andhra Bank was amalgamated into Union Bank of India on 1 April 2020 and the Visa Classic was not carried forward under its own name
- IT WAS NOT A GLOBAL CARD: the bank's own terms of membership read "Visa Classic and Master Cards are valid in India, Nepal & Bhutan only", and no document ever dates the change to the global acceptance the website later advertised
- No airport lounge of any kind — Andhra Bank's own VISA Lounge Access page names only Visa Signature and Visa Business Platinum
- ₹2 lakh of accident cover against the Gold's ₹5 lakh, for a fee that is barely half
- The reward point was worth fifty paise inside the bank's own catalogue and reached no airline, hotel or transfer partner
- Rolling a balance cost 1.75% a month if the minimum was paid and 2.5% if it was not — 21% and 30% a year in the bank's own words
- Hotlisting a lost card cost ₹200 whether or not the card was found again
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes ABLE REWARDS Points into a programme that publishes an award chart. These points buy catalogue and portal redemptions, not award seats — so this page has no flight to show you, and will not invent one.
what the cards that DO reach a chart can fly — 2,196 corridors priced →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹18,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹550 fee. A different question from the one above — earning points and counting toward a threshold are separate rules, and issuers write them separately.
Not published. Andhra Bank states what the Andhra Bank VISA Classic Credit Card earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹18,000 bar. We won't guess it from the earn table or from a sibling card: Axis published three cards' rules on one day and all three lists differed. If you hold this card and have it in writing from the issuer, send us the document and we'll source it.
Lounge access
0 of 793 tracked doors
No lounge access. This card opens exactly 0 of 793 tracked lounge doors — board with the crowd, or find a card that doesn't →
Can you get it?
the route in — no cutoffs published
The cutoffs and the actual route in — not the "apply now" button, the door that opens.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot. Andhra Bank ceased to exist as a licensed bank on 1 April 2020, when it was amalgamated into Union Bank of India. While it was open the bar on the printed schedule was a gross salary of ₹6,500 a month with ₹5,500 net, or ₹78,000 of annual income; the bank's later website raised it to ₹15,000 gross with ₹8,000 net, or ₹1.80 lakh a year. Either way it was relaxed for the bank's own customers and waived against a lien on a term deposit.
Andhra Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
no MITC row researched for this card yet · filter the board by what you can get →
What's changed for this card
1 dated change
Devaluations and buffs that touch this card directly, its issuer, or the points and programs it earns and transfers to. Every one is dated here; the tracker carries each one's before → after and the write-up.
- 1 Jan 1981Andhra Bank issues India's first Visa-branded credit cardCentralcard worked in India only, tiny acceptance → Visa network branding widens merchant acceptance
A year after Centralcard, Andhra Bank launched India's first Visa-branded credit card in 1981, plugging Indian plastic into a global network brand for the first time. Acceptance finally started to widen beyond a handful of merchants. The Visa/Mastercard duopoly that still routes nearly every Indian reward point starts here.
Verified against Andhra Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Andhra Bank's Andhra Bancards fees-and-charges schedule (archived 27-Mar-2016) — the nil admission fee, the ₹550 Classic subscription, the bank-paid ₹2 lakh cover and the India-Nepal-Bhutan limit
- official Andhra Bank's Credit Card Features page (archived 03-Oct-2017) — the ₹18,000 waiver bar, the later global acceptance claim and the reward arithmetic
- official Andhra Bank's credit-card eligibility page (archived 01-Jan-2016) — the bank's own Credit Card Division and the Classic's income bar