Aditya Birla Capital AU Biz
Keep₹49 a month a business never actually pays, and a rewards grid that pays best on the utility bill.
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: Not published — AU states no joining bonus for this card, unlike the 500-point first-transaction offer on its ABC Flex and Nxt siblings
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 — and a business card's accelerator is usually the point. This card is not on the board, which ranks personal cards only; it is ranked against other business cards on /best/business, where the tax, GST and vendor-payment rungs ARE credited and its ₹ 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 ₹10,000 a month
At ₹10,000 a month — ₹1,20,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹300 gross (earn ₹300) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹588 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,20,000 a year = ₹300 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 #544
Why #544 Carried on the business axis, not ranked against personal cards. A ₹49-a-month commercial card whose fee disappears at ₹10,000 of monthly spend — which any real business clears — paying 5 RP per ₹100 on grocery, utilities, education, government and insurance, and 2 on everything else. The travel content is two railway lounge visits a quarter and a 3.5% forex markup, so this is an operating-expense card, not a trip.
AU Reward Points house at ₹0.25. ABCL markets the point at ₹0.20 and adds a ₹99 + GST charge to every redemption plus a 200-point floor, so the house value is the generous reading; it is the figure every other AU card on this board is priced against, which keeps the shelf internally consistent.
The take
This is the commercial rung of the Aditya Birla Capital range AU issues, and it is built around the spend a small business actually has rather than the spend a card marketer wishes it had: grocery, utilities, education and government payments, and insurance, all at ten points per ₹200 — five per ₹100, or 1.25% at the house value. Everything else earns two per ₹200, a quarter of a percent, with one wrinkle worth timing: for the first five days of every month, ordinary online and offline spend doubles to four per ₹200. Move the monthly supplier run into that window and the card pays half a percent instead of a quarter. The fee is the honest part. ₹49 a month sounds like nothing and is ₹588 a year, but AU waives it in any statement cycle you put ₹10,000 through the card — a threshold a business clears in a week. Note the shape of that test: it is monthly, not annual, so a quiet month costs ₹49 even in a year of heavy spend. There is no travel case. AU's only lounge line on this card is a railway one, behind a station list the page never prints; the forex markup is the full 3.50%, and AU Reward Points reach no airline and no hotel — they redeem in the ABCL app against your statement, minimum 200 points, ₹99 plus GST a time, and they expire two years from the statement month. Hold it for the operating expenses, pay it in full, and let the fee waive itself.
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
₹588/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹588/yr
The waiver ₹1,20,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹10,000 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹10,000 a month — ₹1,20,000 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
₹800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹9,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹15,000 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
AU Small Finance 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.
What has changed under this card
- 1 Apr 2026 AU stops paying reward points on transportation merchant codes issuer-wide
We price what is in force today — a change that has not happened yet is not in these numbers. the full archive for this card →
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 complimentary railway lounge visits a calendar quarter, add-on cardholders included
- 10 Reward Points per ₹200 on grocery, utilities, education & government and insurance — 1.25% at the house value
- 'FirstFive Delights' — ordinary spend doubles to 4 points per ₹200 in the first five days of every month
- ₹49-a-month fee reversed in any statement cycle with ₹10,000 of spend
- 1% fuel surcharge waived on every fuel transaction between ₹400 and ₹5,000, with no cap
- Up to 30% off at 300+ restaurants in 30 cities on AU's Silver Spoon dining programme
Watch out
- The fee test is MONTHLY, not annual: a statement cycle under ₹10,000 costs ₹49 + GST even inside a heavy year
- 3.50% forex markup and no airport lounge of any kind — the two railway visits a quarter are the whole travel benefit, and AU does not print the eligible-station list
- AU Reward Points transfer to no airline or hotel; they redeem against your statement at ₹99 + GST a time, minimum 200 points, and expire two years from the statement month
- AU's exclusion list names insurance among the spends that earn NOTHING while its accelerator names insurance among the 10X special categories — the page contradicts itself and AU has not resolved it
- No welcome offer: the 500-point first-transaction bonus on ABC Flex and Nxt has no counterpart here
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes AU Reward 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 →
What earns, what doesn't
2 sourced rules
AU files education with grocery, utilities, government and insurance in ONE accelerated band and publishes no cap on it, so the rate is the whole education answer here. The education and government rows are asserted below; the rest of AU's band is not read on this pass.
- Government / tax · accelerated 10 Reward Points per ₹200 on a government payment — AU names "Government" inside the same special-categories band as grocery, utilities, education and insurance, five times the 2 Reward Points per ₹200 the card pays on ordinary online and offline spend, 1.25% at ₹0.25 a point. AU publishes no cap on the band and government is in neither of its exclusion lists, so none is recorded here. BBPS IS on the ordinary band's exclusion list and this desk reads it card-wide, so a tax or municipal bill routed through Bharat BillPay earns nothing at all
- Education · accelerated 10 Reward Points per ₹200 on AU's "special categories that are Grocery, Utilities, Education & Government, and Insurance spends" — five times the 2 Reward Points per ₹200 the card pays on ordinary online and offline spend. AU publishes no cap on the band and education is in neither of its exclusion lists, so none is recorded here. AU does print that list against the ordinary band — EMI, BBPS, cash withdrawals, fuel, insurance, jewellery and rent — and this desk reads it card-wide, so a school payment routed through Bharat BillPay earns nothing at all
per AU Small Finance Bank T&C · rank every card by spend category →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹1,20,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹588 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. AU Small Finance Bank states what the Aditya Birla Capital AU Biz earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹1,20,000 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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
Applications run through Aditya Birla Capital rather than AU's own card shelf. AU publishes age bands only — 25 to 65 self-employed, 21 to 60 salaried, resident Indian, add-on holders over 18 — and no income floor, no turnover floor and no vintage requirement for the business.
AU Small Finance 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
8 dated changes
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.
- 7 Jul 2026AU makes the CheQ AU card lifetime free, dropping ₹499 joining and ₹499 renewal"CheQ AU — Joining Fee ₹499 & Renewal Fee ₹499"; the LED variant "Joining Fee ₹1499 & Renewal Fee ₹499"; renewal waived by spending ₹3,00,000 in a year. → "CheQ AU Credit Card — Lifetime free (₹999 + GST one-time fee applicable for LED Card only)." CheQ no longer appears in the fee-waiver block at all, because there is no fee left to waive.
Caught as live drift on 24 August 2026 and dated to the document that carries it: AU's bank-wide MITC and Schedule of Charges, version 2.21, "Last updated on 7th July'2026". The previous edition — version 2.19, 16 May 2026, still served from a different path on AU's own site — prints the old numbers in the same table, which is what makes this a change and not a reading error. AU announced nothing. A ₹499 card becoming lifetime free is a real buff and the direction is worth naming, but price it honestly, because the fee was never the problem with this card. AU advertises the CheQ AU rungs as percentages — 12% on CheQ Travel and utility bills, 5% on online shopping, 1% on everything — and every one of those headlines is exactly double what it returns, because AU prints the POINT count with a percent sign and a CheQ Point is worth ₹0.50 at AU's own published redemption rates. The base rung AU calls "1%" pays 0.5%. Removing ₹499 a year from a card that returns half what its own page claims makes it a better free card, not a good one — and the earn still lands in a CheQ app account rather than on your statement, and expires two years from credit. ONE READING TRAP, since a later lane will hit it: three editions of this MITC sit at four URLs on au.bank.in, two of them differing only in filename case and punctuation, eight months apart. Only /credit-cards/mitc(with-schedule-of-charges).pdf serves v2.21. A drift check run against any of the others is a drift check against a stale table.
- 6 May 2026AU relaunches its card range — Ananta tops a new four-card deck
- 10 Apr 2026AU more than doubles its domestic-lounge spend gate to ₹50,000/quarter
- 1 Apr 2026AU stops paying reward points on transportation merchant codes
- 22 Dec 2024AU rewrites where the ixigo co-brand earns — four categories to nil, three to a reduced rate
- 1 Apr 2024AU zeroes out rewards on fuel, rent, education and government
- 21 Mar 2024AU unveils Zenith+ — a metal card built for the departure gate
- 5 Jul 2023AU Rewardz devalues vouchers 20% and tolls every redemptionE-vouchers at ₹0.25/point; free redemptions; uncapped Zenith earning → E-vouchers cut to ₹0.20/point; ₹99 + taxes per redemption; Zenith capped at 40k points/cycle (20k per category)
AU's first big rewrite of its points program hits from three directions at once: the e-voucher rate — the redemption most cardholders actually use — drops from ₹0.25 to ₹0.20 per point, every successful redemption now costs ₹99 plus taxes, and Zenith's earning gets a 40,000-point statement-cycle ceiling. A closed-loop currency with no transfer partners just got 20% smaller and pay-per-exit.
Every AU Small Finance Bank change we've dated → 9 events since 2021, 5 of them nerfs — worst year 2024.
Verified against AU Small Finance Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 2 of them, each with the day we read it
- official AU Small Finance Bank's own ABC Biz page — the 10X and 2X reward bands, the FirstFive window, the ₹49 monthly fee and its ₹10,000 reversal, the railway lounge and the 3.50% markup
- official Aditya Birla Capital's co-brand programme page — the four-card range, and ABC Biz named as one of the four variants