AU Laksya Credit Card
KeepEight airport lounges and a ₹1,000 welcome for a ₹1,000 fee — then 0.50%, and the fee needs ₹2 lakh to waive.
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: 4,000 bonus reward points (₹1,000) or a ₹1,000 brand voucher — your choice — on card activation and first transaction
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 →
Breaks even only by erasing its fee at ₹17,000 a month
At ₹17,000 a month — ₹2,04,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,000 gross (earn ₹1,000) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹1,000 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹2,00,000 a year = ₹1,000 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
Laksya is AU's mid-market lifestyle card and the pitch is front-loaded. The welcome pays back the fee on day one — 4,000 reward points, ₹1,000 at AU's catalogue rate, or a ₹1,000 brand voucher if you prefer it in one piece — and there is no first-year waiver to chase because AU says plainly there is no joining-fee waiver at all. What you get after that is eight complimentary domestic airport lounge visits a year, two a quarter behind ₹50,000 of spend in the previous quarter, and three monthly discount rungs worth up to ₹250 each: 15% off Amazon Grocery, 15% off Zomato and buy-one-get-one movie tickets on District. Used every month those are worth ₹9,000 a year on their own, which is the real case for the card. The earn is ordinary. Two points per ₹100 is 0.50%; five points on groceries, departmental stores and contactless is 1.25%, and AU caps the grocery half at 1,000 points a statement while leaving Tap & Pay uncapped — an unusual and genuinely useful asymmetry if you tap for everything. The renewal bar is the problem: ₹2 lakh of retail spend a year to avoid ₹1,000, which is ₹16,700 a month on a card paying half a percent. Below that you are buying the lounges and the vouchers, which is a defensible thing to buy — just be honest that it is what you are doing.
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
₹1,000/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹1,000/yr
The waiver ₹2,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹16,667 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹17,000 a month — ₹2,04,000 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
₹1,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹6,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹18,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹30,000 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
- 4,000 reward points or a ₹1,000 brand voucher on activation — the welcome covers the first year's fee
- 8 complimentary domestic airport lounge visits a year (2 a quarter)
- 5 reward points per ₹100 on groceries, departmental stores and Tap & Pay — and the Tap & Pay half is uncapped
- 15% off Amazon Grocery, 15% off Zomato and BOGO movie tickets on District, each up to ₹250 a month
- 2 reward points per ₹100 (0.50%) on all other retail spend
Watch out
- ₹2,00,000 of annual retail spend to waive the ₹1,000 renewal — ₹16,700 a month on a 0.50% card
- No first-year fee waiver at all: AU states 'there is no joining fee waiver on the AU Laksya Credit Card'
- The grocery and departmental-store half of the 5X rung stops at 1,000 points a statement cycle
- Lounge access needs ₹50,000 of spend in the previous calendar quarter
- 3.49% cross-currency markup — AU's standard band
- AU Reward Points redeem at ₹0.25 in the catalogue and this card reaches no transfer partner
- Cash, rent, education and government, EMI, fuel, BBPS, transportation and quasi-cash earn nothing
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 →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹2,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹1,000 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 Laksya Credit Card earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹2,00,000 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: ₹50,000 of spend in the previous calendar quarter
Opens 50 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 32 airports — see the full map →
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.
₹1,000 + applicable taxes, waived only from the second year and only by ₹2,00,000 of retail spend in the previous card anniversary year — AU states outright that "there is no joining fee waiver on the AU Laksya Credit Card", so year one is always paid. In exchange the welcome covers it: 4,000 Reward Points or a ₹1,000 brand voucher on activation and first transaction. 8 domestic airport lounge visits a year, 2 a quarter, behind ₹50,000 of previous-quarter spend. Earn: 5 RP per ₹100 on groceries, departmental stores and contactless — and AU splits the cap, "a maximum of 1000 Reward Points in a card statement cycle on Grocery and Departmental stores spends. There is no maximum capping on Contactless/Tap and Pay transactions"; 2 RP per ₹100 on other retail; 1 RP on insurance, utility and telecom. Three monthly partner rungs of up to ₹250 each: 15% off Amazon Grocery, 15% off Zomato and BOGO movie tickets on District. Cross-currency mark-up 3.49%: AU's bank-wide MITC prices "Laksya" in its 3.49% row, which earlier lanes missed because they read the FAQ (where the card is absent from every list) rather than the schedule of charges. The ₹50,000 lounge gate comes from Laksya's OWN page — the 10-Apr-2026 Usage T&C that states the rule scopes itself to "AU Zenith, Vetta, Xcite Ace, Xcite Ultra, SPONT, NOMO, ABCL Pro credit cardholders only".
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 — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official AU's Laksya page — the 5/2/1 points per ₹100 grid with its 1,000-point grocery cap, the 8 lounge visits and their ₹50,000 gate, the welcome choice, and the ₹1,000 fee with its ₹2,00,000 waiver
- official AU's credit-card FAQ — the AU Rewardz programme behind these points and the bank-wide cross-currency mark-up table
- 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
- 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)
- official AU's bank-wide MITC and Schedule of Charges, v2.21 (7 July 2026) — the cross-currency mark-up table that prices this card at 3.49%, and the annual-fee grid it sits in