AU Altura Plus Credit Card
Keep1.5% offline until ₹100 a month runs out, then a quarter of a percent — Altura's upgrade is mostly a bigger fee.
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: None — AU publishes no activation or sign-up benefit on Altura Plus
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 travel and 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 →
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 ₹200 gross (earn ₹200) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹80,000 a year = ₹200 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.
1 notes on the card itself: how it is issued
The take
Altura Plus costs ₹499 against Altura's ₹199 and restructures rather than improves. The headline is 1.5% cashback on offline retail, up from Altura's 1%, and the cap is ₹100 a statement cycle rather than ₹50 — so ₹6,667 of card-present spend a month before it is gone. What is genuinely different is what happens next: where Altura simply stops paying, Altura Plus drops to one reward point per ₹100 on POS and keeps going, and pays two points per ₹100 — 0.50% at AU's ₹0.25 catalogue rate — on everything online, with no published ceiling. Add 500 bonus points, ₹125, in any calendar month that clears ₹20,000, and a heavy spender does better here than on Altura even though the headline rate looks similar. Do the arithmetic before you upgrade, though. The best case is ₹1,200 of cashback, ₹1,500 of monthly bonuses and 0.25–0.50% on the rest, against a ₹499 fee that needs ₹80,000 of annual spend to waive — double Altura's bar. Below about ₹40,000 a year the cheaper card wins outright. There is no airport lounge access on either, both carry the eight railway lounge visits, and the forex markup is AU's standard 3.49%. This is a supermarket-and-online card with a slightly higher ceiling, not a step up in class.
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
₹499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹499/yr
The waiver ₹80,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹6,667 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
₹600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹2,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹3,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹8,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹12,600 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
- 1.5% cashback on offline retail spends, up to ₹100 a statement cycle
- 2X reward points (2 per ₹100, 0.50%) on every online transaction, with no published ceiling
- 500 bonus reward points (₹125) in any calendar month clearing ₹20,000 of retail spend
- 8 complimentary railway lounge visits a year
- ₹499 fee waives at ₹20,000 of spend in the first 90 days, then ₹80,000 an anniversary year
Watch out
- The 1.5% rung stops at ₹100 of cashback a statement cycle — ₹6,667 of offline spend — and drops to 1 point per ₹100 after that
- AU Reward Points are worth ₹0.25 in the catalogue, so 2X online is 0.50%, not 2%
- The renewal waiver bar is ₹80,000 a year, twice Altura's, for a rung that pays only ₹500 more
- No airport lounge access
- 3.49% forex markup — AU's standard band
- Cash, rent, education and government, EMI, fuel, BBPS and quasi-cash earn nothing, and transportation MCCs stopped earning on 1 Apr 2026
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
14 sourced rules · 7 pay zero
Altura Plus pays cashback until a ₹100-a-cycle ceiling, then switches to Reward Points: 1 RP/₹100 offline, 2 RP/₹100 online, 1 RP/₹100 on utility, telecom and insurance. Its exclusion note is one of AU's most complete — "Cash, Rent, Education & Govt, EMI, Fuel, BBPS and Quasi Cash transactions are not eligible for Reward Points" — and it carries the dated notice that names the transportation change: "With effect from 1st April 2026, Reward Points accrual on Transportation Merchant Category Codes will be discontinued."
- Fuel · excluded Zero Reward Points — named in AU's exclusion note, and fuel is separately struck from the bonus-points spend calculation ("Fuel transactions and Cash withdrawal are excluded from Bonus Reward Points spends calculation"). 1% fair-usage on fuel past 50% of the limit or ₹50,000 a month, tightening to any transaction above ₹10,000 from 1-Jul-2026 (MITC)
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero Reward Points — named in AU's exclusion note; domestic rent (MCC 6513) also costs 1% with a ₹99 minimum (MITC)
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero Reward Points — "Quasi Cash" is named in AU's exclusion note, and wallet loads settle as quasi-cash
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · capped 1 Reward Point per ₹100 with a hard 100-RP-per-TRANSACTION ceiling — a ₹15,000 electricity bill earns 100 points, not 150 — and AU's note excludes BBPS transactions from Reward Points entirely, which is the rail most Indian utility bills settle over. 1% fair-usage fee past ₹50,000 of utility spend a month (MITC)
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
₹80,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹499 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 Plus Credit Card earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹80,000 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 — no spend condition stated on the 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, ₹499 + GST, waived by ₹20,000 of retail spend in the first 90 days and ₹80,000 in the previous card anniversary year. 1.5% cashback on offline retail, capped ₹100 a statement cycle; past that cap the card falls to 1 Reward Point per ₹100 on POS. Online spend earns 2 RP per ₹100 with no published ceiling; utility, telecom and insurance earn 1 RP per ₹100 capped at 100 RP a transaction. 500 bonus RP in any calendar month clearing ₹20,000 of retail spend. Cash, rent, education and government, EMI, fuel, BBPS and quasi-cash earn nothing, and transportation MCCs stopped earning on 1 Apr 2026. 8 railway lounge visits a year, no airport lounge.
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
Every document behind this page — 2 of them, each with the day we read it
- official AU's Altura Plus page — 1.5% offline cashback capped at ₹100 a cycle, the 1 and 2 point per ₹100 rungs that follow it, the 500-point monthly bonus and the ₹499 fee with both waivers
- official AU's credit-card FAQ — Altura Plus at ₹499, its ₹20,000/90-day and ₹80,000/year waiver bars, and the 3.49% cross-currency mark-up