Aditya Birla Capital AU Nxt
KeepThe Gen Z half of a two-name, one-terms-sheet pair — free, and best on the electricity 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: 500 Reward Points on the first transaction within 30 days of card setup — ₹125 at AU's ₹0.25 house value, on a card that costs nothing
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 →
Pays from the first rupee
At ₹1,000 a month — ₹12,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹0 gross (earn ₹0) against its ₹0 fee = ₹0 net — at or above ₹0 from the first rung we price. 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 #546
Why #546 ABC Flex's twin, marketed at a younger holder and priced identically to the paisa: 0.75% on utilities, grocery and education, 0.25% elsewhere, every band doubling past ₹50,000 a quarter. Carried as its own card because AU issues it as one — the numbers are shared, the plastic and the application are not. Cashback shelf, not travel: 3.50% forex and no airport lounge.
AU Reward Points house at ₹0.25. ABCL markets the point at ₹0.20 and charges ₹99 + GST on every redemption above a 200-point floor, so ₹0.25 is the generous reading; it is the figure every other AU card on this board is priced against, which keeps the shelf consistent.
The take
Aditya Birla Capital sells four co-branded cards through AU, and this is the free one pitched at what the page calls "a dynamic Gen Z" — its twin, ABC Flex, is aimed at the seasoned customer, and AU publishes exactly one terms sheet covering both. That sheet is worth reading before the marketing: for all the generational framing, what it describes is a household-bills card. Utilities, grocery, departmental stores and education earn six points per ₹200 — three per ₹100, or 0.75% at the house value. Online spend earns four per ₹200, offline two, and a list of ten merchant categories earns nothing at all: fuel, insurance, jewellery, rent, BBPS, EMI and cash. The number that makes it interesting is the quarterly one. Put ₹50,000 of retail spend through the card in a calendar quarter and every band doubles — the 6X becomes 12X, the 4X becomes 8X, the 2X becomes 4X — which turns the utility rung into 1.5% and the floor into half a percent. ₹50,000 a quarter is ₹16,700 a month, which a household running its bills and groceries through one card clears without trying. There is no ceiling published on the doubling, which is unusual enough to be worth using. Everything else is small and honest. Five percent back on Ola, capped at ₹100 a statement cycle. A 1% fuel surcharge waiver between ₹400 and ₹5,000, on a card that earns nothing on fuel. Up to 30% off at 300-odd restaurants on AU's Silver Spoon programme. And a card that costs nothing to hold, forever — though AU will sell you optional feature packs from ₹49 to ₹499 that auto-renew every 90 days, and those carry spend targets with penalties of their own. There is no travel dimension: 3.50% forex, no airport lounge, and points that reach no airline and no hotel. File it under bills, not boarding passes.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card is lifetime free. There is no fee due, no renewal to weigh, and nothing to cancel to save.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
nothing due at the anniversary · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 — lifetime free
At your spend
₹800 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,500 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹3,000 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹9,000 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹15,000 a year at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
Everyday earn plus milestones, with no fee to subtract — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
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
- Lifetime free — AU states it in the features table and again in the FAQ
- 6 Reward Points per ₹200 on utilities, grocery & departmental stores and education — 0.75% at the house value
- Every band DOUBLES for the quarter once retail spend passes ₹50,000 in a calendar quarter, with no published ceiling
- 500 Reward Points on the first transaction within 30 days
- 5% cashback on Ola bookings, up to ₹100 a statement cycle
- 1% fuel surcharge waived on fuel transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000
Watch out
- 3.50% forex markup and no airport lounge of any kind — there is no travel case on this card
- AU Reward Points reach no airline and no hotel: they redeem against your statement at ₹99 + GST a time, minimum 200 points, and expire two years from the statement month
- Ten merchant categories earn NOTHING — AU lists MCCs 5172, 5541, 5542, 5552, 5983, 6513, 5094, 5944, 5960 and 6300, plus cash withdrawals, BBPS and EMI
- The optional feature packs (₹49 to ₹499) auto-renew every 90 days and carry their own spend targets — ₹5,000, ₹10,000 or ₹20,000 in 90 days, with penalties of ₹50, ₹100 and ₹200 for missing them
- Every published number on this card is identical to ABC Flex's; AU sells them as two cards for two generations off one terms sheet
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
1 sourced rule
One AU page covers ABC Nxt and ABC Flex and every number below that heading is shared, so this row and `au-abc-flex`'s are identical by the issuer's own doing. Only the education row is asserted here; the rest of AU's band is not read on this pass.
- Education · accelerated 6 Reward Points per ₹200 on AU's "Utilities, Grocery & Departmental stores, and Education category spends" — three times the 2 Reward Points per ₹200 the card pays on offline spend and half again the 4 per ₹200 it pays online. AU publishes no cap on the band and education is in neither exclusion list, so none is recorded here. The published exclusions are EMI, cash withdrawals, BBPS, fuel, insurance, jewellery and rent, 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 →
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 at all.
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