AU InstaPay RuPay Credit Card
KeepA free virtual RuPay card that pays 1% on UPI groceries — up to ₹100 a month, and nothing anywhere else.
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 InstaPay
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 ₹100 gross (earn ₹100) against its ₹0 fee = ₹100 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants
The take
InstaPay is AU's answer to the credit-card-on-UPI question and it is deliberately narrow. There is no plastic to wait for — the card is virtual first, issued to the app, linked to UPI, and it costs nothing to take or keep, forever. It pays 1% cashback on UPI transactions in exactly four categories: departmental stores, dining, pharmacy, and groceries and supermarkets. Everything else earns nothing that AU has published, and the 1% itself stops at ₹100 in a statement cycle — ₹10,000 of qualifying spend a month. So the honest ceiling on this card is ₹1,200 a year, and only if you route ₹10,000 of chemist, restaurant and supermarket QR payments through it every single month. There is a floor too: transactions below ₹200 earn nothing at all, which rules out most of what a QR code actually gets used for. Around that there is a 1% fuel surcharge waiver on transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000, up to 50 interest-free days, and nothing else — no lounge access, no milestone, no welcome benefit, and AU's standard 3.49% forex markup. As a free, zero-risk second card for grocery QR payments it is fine. It is not a card to spend on, and AU is not pretending it is.
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
₹1,200 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,200 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,200 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,200 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,200 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 — 'Zero Fees. Forever.' in AU's own words, and repeated in the bank-wide FAQ
- 1% cashback on UPI spend at departmental stores, dining, pharmacy and grocery or supermarkets
- Virtual-first and UPI-linkable, so it works from a QR code without carrying plastic
- Up to 50 interest-free days, and a 1% fuel surcharge waiver on transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000
Watch out
- Cashback caps at ₹100 a statement cycle — ₹10,000 of qualifying spend a month, and ₹1,200 a year at best
- Only four merchant categories earn, and only on UPI; AU publishes no rate for anything else
- Transactions below ₹200 earn nothing
- No lounge access, no welcome benefit and no milestone
- 3.49% forex markup — AU's standard band
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 →
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.
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.
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.
Lifetime free — "Zero Fees. Forever." on the product page, and AU's bank-wide FAQ lists InstaPay among its lifetime-free cards. A virtual-first RuPay card built to be linked to UPI. The earn is narrow: 1% cashback on UPI transactions at departmental stores, dining, pharmacy and grocery or supermarkets ONLY, capped at ₹100 a statement cycle, with a floor of ₹200 a transaction. AU publishes no rate for anything else. Up to 50 interest-free days; 1% fuel surcharge waiver on transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000. No lounge access, no welcome benefit, no milestone. The cap figure comes from the RuPay FAQ answer AU renders in full on the Altura page and truncates on InstaPay's own.
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's InstaPay page — 'Zero Fees. Forever.', the 1% cashback on UPI at four merchant categories, the ₹200 minimum transaction and the 50-day interest-free window
- official AU's own FAQ answer naming InstaPay's cashback cap — '1% on selected merchant categories capped at ₹100 per statement cycle'
- official AU's credit-card FAQ — InstaPay listed as lifetime free, and the 3.49% cross-currency mark-up