AU Business Cashback Credit Card
Keep₹99 a month, waived on ₹10,000 — and eight railway lounges a year.
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
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 ₹1,200 gross (earn ₹1,200) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹1,188 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,20,000 a year = ₹1,200 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #508
Why #508 A business card carried, not ranked. What it is: a ₹99-a-month cashback card for a small business, waived in any month you spend ₹10,000 — and the only card in this sweep whose lounge benefit is entirely on the railways.
Cashback credited against the card, so it is the rupee at ₹1.00 — there is no points currency here, no catalogue and nothing to transfer. The unusual part is the trigger: AU pays on the REPAYMENT of the Total Amount Due, not on the transaction, so the 1% only equals 1% of spend if you clear the statement in full.
The take
A small-business card priced like a subscription: ₹99 a month rather than an annual fee, waived in any statement cycle you put ₹10,000 of retail spend through it, which means a business doing ₹10,000 a month holds it free and one doing less pays ₹99 for each month it fell short. The earn is 1% cashback, and it is paid on an unusual trigger — the repayment of the Total Amount Due, not the swipe — so the 1% is a full 1% of spend only if you clear the statement in full; revolve at AU's rates and you are paying interest for the privilege of earning it. The travel benefit is the one genuinely distinctive thing here and it is not at an airport: eight complimentary RAILWAY lounge visits a year, which for a business whose people move between Indian cities by train is a more useful door than a fourth airport visit nobody uses. Around it sit a 1% fuel surcharge waiver up to ₹200 on transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000, ₹2 lakh of business insurance, XpressEMI on anything over ₹2,000 at a 1% processing fee, and add-on cards. Read the fee as ₹1,188 a year if you will not hit ₹10,000 a month, and as free if you will.
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
₹1,188/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹1,188/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
₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹6,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹12,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹36,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹60,000 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
- 8 complimentary railway lounge visits a year
- 1% cashback on the repayment of the Total Amount Due
- ₹99 a month, waived in any statement cycle with ₹10,000 of retail spend
- 1% fuel surcharge waiver up to ₹200, on transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000
- Business insurance coverage of up to ₹2 lakh
- XpressEMI on transactions of ₹2,000 or more, at 1% of the converted amount (minimum ₹99 + GST)
Watch out
- The fee is MONTHLY — ₹99 a month, ₹1,188 a year if you never clear the ₹10,000 cycle target
- Cashback pays on REPAYMENT of the Total Amount Due, so revolving a balance means paying interest to earn 1%
- No airport lounge access at all — the eight visits are railway lounges
- AU charges a lounge card-validation fee that it explicitly says will NOT be reversed
- 3.49% cross-currency markup — AU's standard band, on a card whose only travel benefit is a railway lounge
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 →
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 ₹1,188 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 Business Cashback Credit Card earns, 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?
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.
AU's published criteria are age and residency and nothing else: "Primary cardholder between the age of 25 years and 65 years", "Add-on cardholder should be over 18 years", "Resident Indian" — followed by AU's own caveat that "These criteria are only indicative." No turnover floor, income cutoff or GST requirement is published, unlike the business cards from IDFC FIRST.
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
3 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
AU's bank-wide MITC and Schedule of Charges, v2.21 ("Last updated on 7th July'2026"), is the regulatory row behind this card. Fee: "Business Cashback ₹ 99 /month" with "Get waiver on spending ₹10,000 within the statement cycle" — a MONTHLY test, so a quiet cycle costs ₹99 even inside a heavy year, and ₹1,188 is the annualised worst case. Cross-currency mark-up 3.49%: the schedule names "Business Cashback" directly in its 3.49% row alongside Altura, Altura Plus, LIT, InstaPay, AU SPONT, the SwipeUp Xcite series, AU KOSMO, Prathama, Tejas, Laksya, Ananta, CheQ, Paytm AU and AU Zaggle. The card carried a published-absence claim on this figure until 2026-08-23 — the FAQ was read, the schedule of charges was not. Fuel-surcharge waiver up to ₹200 a statement month on transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000. Cash limit 30% of the card limit, shared with Vetta. Additional cards lifetime free.
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 — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official AU Business Cashback product page — the ₹99 MONTHLY membership fee and its per-cycle waiver, the 1% repayment cashback, eight railway lounge visits and the ₹2 lakh insurance
- official AU bank-wide MITC with Schedule of Charges (December 2025) — "Business Cashback ₹99 per month" in the same fee table that prices every AU card, and the ₹10,000 cycle waiver
- official AU's CURRENT retail MITC with Schedule of Charges (7 July 2026) — "Business Cashback ₹99 /month", the ₹10,000 statement-cycle waiver, and the 3.49% cross-currency markup