AU Altura Credit Card
Keep₹199 for two cashback rungs that both stop at ₹50 a month — the caps are the card.
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
Read the ₹0.4L figure carefully: ₹600 of its ₹1,200 gross is a voucher or a hotel night, not points — worth that only if you would have bought it anyway.
Welcome: None — AU publishes no activation or sign-up benefit on Altura
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied: it earns nothing on fuel here, so that spend is dropped, not paid at the headline, and stops pacing milestones and the waiver. 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 for itself at ₹2,000 a month
At ₹2,000 a month — ₹24,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹200 gross (earn ₹200) against its ₹199 fee = ₹0 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #355
Why #355 ₹199 buys eight railway lounge visits a year, and that is the reason it is held where it is. The cashback is not: two rungs that both stop at ₹50 a month cap the card at ₹1,200 a year at every spend level, so there is nothing to rank on the earn side. Railway doors are cheap doors, but they are doors.
The take
Altura is AU's cheapest own-brand card and the headline reads well: 2% cashback on groceries, departmental stores and utility bills, 1% on everything else. Read AU's own footnote and the product collapses to something much smaller — each rung is capped at ₹50 of cashback in a statement cycle. That is ₹2,500 of grocery spend and ₹5,000 of other retail before both stop paying. The absolute ceiling on ongoing cashback is ₹100 a month, ₹1,200 a year, no matter what you spend. On top sits a milestone that is genuinely worth having relative to the fee: ₹50 extra whenever a statement cycle clears ₹10,000, another ₹600 a year. So the realistic best case is about ₹1,800 of cashback against a ₹199 fee that itself waives at ₹40,000 of annual spend — ₹3,333 a month, which anyone hitting the milestone clears easily. The travel content is one line and it is an unusual one: eight complimentary railway lounge visits a year, which almost no card at this price carries. There is no airport lounge access, the forex markup is AU's standard 3.49%, and fuel, rent, wallets, cash, education, government and BBPS earn nothing. Take Altura as a small, free-in-practice grocery rebate with a railway-lounge perk attached. Do not put your spending on it: the caps mean the 87th thousand rupee pays exactly what the 6th does, which is nothing.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
Here is the fee, the spend that clears it, and everything that has moved under this card since you last decided.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹199/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹199/yr
The waiver ₹40,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹3,333 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.
At your spend
₹1,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,200 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% cashback on groceries, departmental stores and utility bills; 1% on other retail
- ₹50 extra cashback in any statement cycle that clears ₹10,000 of retail spend
- 8 complimentary railway lounge visits a year — rare at a ₹199 fee
- ₹199 fee waives at ₹10,000 of spend in the first 90 days, then ₹40,000 an anniversary year
- Free add-on cards and zero-processing-fee EMI on transactions of ₹2,000 or more
Watch out
- Both cashback rungs are capped at ₹50 a statement cycle each — ₹100 a month, ₹1,200 a year, whatever you spend
- The 2% rate runs out after ₹2,500 of grocery spend in a cycle
- No airport lounge access of any kind
- 3.49% forex markup — AU's standard band, no better than the Indian norm
- Fuel, rent, wallet loads and cash earn nothing, and education, government and BBPS were removed from the programme on 1 Apr 2024
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Statement cashback (₹) 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
12 sourced rules · 6 pay zero
READ THE UTILITIES ROW. Altura's headline is "2% cashback on groceries, departmental stores and utility bill payments" — and the note directly beneath it on the same page says "With effect from 1st April 2024, Education & Govt, BBPS transactions will not be eligible for Cashback". BBPS is the Bharat Bill Payment System, the rail most Indian utility bills actually settle over, so the marketed category and the excluded rail overlap heavily. Both tiers are capped at ₹50 of cashback a statement cycle — ₹2,500 of accelerated spend, ₹5,000 of ordinary spend — so the whole card is worth ₹1,200 a year at absolute best.
- Fuel · excluded Zero cashback — "Fuel, Rent, Wallet & Cash transactions are excluded from earning of cashback", AU's own note. AU's MITC also charges 1% fair-usage on fuel past 50% of the credit limit or ₹50,000 a month, and from 1-Jul-2026 on any single fuel transaction above ₹10,000 (MCC 5172, 5541, 5542, 5552, 5983)
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero cashback — named in AU's exclusion note. Domestic rent (MCC 6513) also costs 1% of the transaction with a ₹99 minimum; international rent is free of the fee (MITC)
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero cashback — wallet loads are named in AU's exclusion note alongside cash
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · accelerated CONTRADICTED ON THE ISSUER'S OWN PAGE. AU headlines 2% cashback on utility bill payments, capped at ₹50 a statement cycle (₹2,500 of spend), while the note below it excludes BBPS transactions from cashback from 1-Apr-2024 — and BBPS is how most Indian utility bills are paid. A biller paid directly, off BBPS, appears to earn the 2%. AU's MITC adds a 1% fair-usage fee on utility spend past ₹50,000 a month
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
₹40,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹199 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 AU Altura Credit Card earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹40,000 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
21 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: None — AU states no spend condition on Altura's railway visits
Opens 21 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 19 railway stations , via DreamFolks Railway — see the full map →
Can you get it?
income, age and the route in
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.
per the official AU Small Finance Bank MITC — figures marked (community) aren't in the PDF; the issuer won't say · filter the board by what you can get →
The fine print
2 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
ONE published fee, ₹199 + GST, with two waiver bars: ₹10,000 of retail spend in the first 90 days and ₹40,000 in the previous card anniversary year. THE CAPS ARE THE PRODUCT: 2% on groceries, departmental stores and utility bills is capped at ₹50 of cashback a statement cycle, and the 1% on all other retail is capped at ₹50 a cycle too — ₹100 a month whatever you spend. A separate ₹50 lands in any cycle clearing ₹10,000 of retail spend. Fuel, rent, wallet loads and cash never earned; education, government and BBPS were removed on 1 Apr 2024. 8 railway lounge visits a year and NO airport lounge access. Fuel surcharge waiver 1% on ₹400–₹5,000, max ₹100 a cycle.
per the official AU Small Finance Bank MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
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