AU Ananta
CancelAU's flagship is a lounge pass wearing a rewards card's clothes.
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: 8,000 Reward Points (₹2,000) on activation and first transaction within 30 days
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 ₹23,000 a month
At ₹23,000 a month — ₹2,76,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹2,500 gross (earn ₹1,200 + milestones ₹1,300) against its ₹2,000 fee = ₹500 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 · the network variants
The take
Ananta tops AU's May-2026 four-card relaunch, and the brochure reads well: ₹2,000 fee, 16 domestic lounge visits a year, 8,000 welcome points, up to 50,000 milestone points. Then you price the currency. AU points are worth ₹0.25 in a closed catalogue with a ₹99 fee per redemption and a 24-month fuse — so the 5X headline on shopping, dining and travel is 1.25%, general spend is 0.5%, and no transfer partner rescues it. When AU joined Air India Maharaja Club in Jun-2025 only Zenith+ landed a useful 3:2 ratio; Ananta isn't in Air India's published AU transfer table at all, so its points stay closed-loop. The lounge visits unlock only in quarters where you put ₹5,000 of flights through AU Rewardz, and the 3.49% forex markup disqualifies it from leaving the country. Even at its ₹10L milestone best this card earns half of what boring mid-tier cards pay. Skip it.
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
₹2,000/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹2,000/yr
The waiver ₹3,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹25,000 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹23,000 a month — ₹2,76,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹6,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹17,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹28,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹39,200 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
- 6 May 2026 AU relaunches its card range — Ananta tops a new four-card deck
- 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
- ₹2,000 a year, waived from year two at ₹3L of retail spend — cheap seat at the lounge table
- 16 domestic lounge visits/yr (4/quarter) — real, if you clear the booking gate
- 50,000 milestone points (₹12,500) a year, in four tranches from ₹2.5L to ₹10L spend
- 8,000-point welcome on activation
Watch out
- ₹0.25/point, closed loop — absent from Air India's AU transfer table (Zenith+/Zenith/Vetta convert; Ananta doesn't), ₹99 + GST per redemption
- 0.5% base earn; even the 5X categories pay just 1.25% — and are capped at 5,000 RP a statement cycle
- Lounge visits require ₹5,000 of AU Rewardz flight bookings in the same quarter
- 3.49% forex markup — do not take this card abroad
- Points expire 24 months from the transaction date
- Year one's ₹2,000 can't be spent away — AU's own waiver table starts Ananta at "2nd Year onwards"
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 · 6 pay zero
AU's 1-Apr-2024 bank-wide revision zeroed rent, education, government, fuel and wallet earn on (almost) all cards, and cut utilities/telecom to 1 RP/₹100 — Ananta launched May-2026 inside that regime. The KFS publishes fair-usage fee MCCs (fuel 5172/5541/5542/5552/5983, utility 4900, rent 6513, education 8211–8299, transport 4111/4112/4784).
- Fuel · excluded Zero RP (bank-wide since 1-Apr-2024); 1% surcharge waiver ₹400–₹5,000, cap ₹200/cycle; 1% fair-usage fee past ₹10k/txn or ₹25k/month w.e.f. 1-Jul-2026 (official KFS)
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero RP; 1% fee on domestic rentals, min ₹99 (official KFS — international rent txns fee-free)
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero RP on wallet loads since 1-Apr-2024
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · reduced 1 RP/₹100 (0.25%), capped 100 RP/txn (Apr-2024 rule); 1% fee past ₹50k/month (official KFS)
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
₹3,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹2,000 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 Ananta earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹3,00,000 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
50 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: ₹5,000+ of flight bookings via AU Rewardz in the same quarter
Opens 50 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 32 airports — 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
7 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
Fee ₹2,000 a year — AU's table is headed "Annual/Renewal Fee" and gives Ananta ONE number, and AU writes "Joining Fee X & Renewal Fee Y" longhand (CheQ AU) where a card really carries two. Year one is charged on activation and is not waivable; the ₹3L waiver only ever reaches a renewal. Fair-usage fees bank-wide: domestic rent 1% (min ₹99), utility 1% past ₹50k/month, fuel 1% past ₹10k/txn or ₹25k/month (w.e.f. 1-Jul-2026), transportation 1% past ₹25k/month (w.e.f. 14-Jun-2026), third-party education apps 1% (min ₹99). AU publishes no income cutoff for Ananta; age from community sources.
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 — 11 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — ₹2,000 charged on activation with no first-year waiver, then waived at ₹3,00,000 of retail spend in the previous anniversary year
- official MITC with Schedule of Charges (7-Jul-2026) — Ananta Annual/Renewal Fee ₹2,000
- official AU bank-wide Key Fact Statement v1.8 (7-Jul-2026) — Ananta ₹2,000 fee, foreign-currency / dynamic & static conversion markup 3.49%
- official Milestone Benefit T&C (1-Mar-2026) — incremental 5k/10k/15k/20k RP at ₹2.5L/₹5L/₹7.5L/₹10L; fuel and cash excluded
- community CardInsider launch coverage
- community CardsWala listing
- community Paisabazaar — notes virtual-card UPI link; network still unpublished
- official Air India — AU conversion table (Zenith+ 1.5:1; Spont/Xcite/Altura Plus/Nomo/Vetta/Zenith/Lit/ABC 6:1; Ananta absent); Partner page live since Jun-2025
- community CardInsider — AU joins Maharaja Club (published 22-Jul-2025, not Jun-2026 as we previously dated it; Ananta absent from the ratio table; honest absence)
- official AU Usage T&C (w.e.f. 10-Apr-2026) — the domestic lounge programme runs on AU's OWN 50+ room list, not a card scheme; ₹50,000 prior-quarter spend gate
- official AU's own domestic lounge list for every card except Zenith+ — 50 rooms in 24 cities (Adani, Encalm, Travel Club, 080, Earth, Primus, Pearl, Blackberry, Airr)