Paytm AU Credit Card
KeepA free card that pays 1% on small Paytm QR payments and 12 lounge passes for booking flights on Paytm.
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; the 12 lounge passes are earned through Paytm Travel bookings instead
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
AU prices this card's points at ₹0.50 on the AU Rewardz catalogue — twice what the same catalogue pays Zenith or the Xcite series — and at ₹1.00 when redeemed as Paytm Gold in the Paytm app. The site values them at the AU Rewardz rate, so the Gold route is upside we do not count.
The take
The Paytm AU card is built around one behaviour: paying by QR code inside the Paytm app, in amounts under ₹2,000. Do that and it pays two reward points per ₹100 which AU redeems at ₹0.50 apiece — a genuine 1%, and double what the same points are worth to a Zenith holder from the same catalogue. Go above ₹2,000 in a single Paytm QR payment and it halves. Pay through any other UPI app and it collapses to one point per ₹400, an eighth of the good rate. That cliff is the card, and it is deliberate. Two things lift it above the ordinary. Paytm Travel and Paytm Gold earn five points per ₹100 — 2.5% at the ₹0.50 rate, and AU says the points are worth a full ₹1 if you take them back out as Gold, which would make it 5% for a gold buyer. And the lounge benefit is unusual: rather than a spend gate, you get up to twelve domestic airport lounge passes a year by booking return flights on Paytm Travel, one QR per ₹5,000 round trip, four per booking. A family booking two return trips a year clears most of it. It is lifetime free, so none of this has to clear a fee. What to watch: the Paytm Travel and Gold rung carries a monthly cap AU publishes in its programme terms rather than on the page, the lounge QRs cannot be cancelled once generated, and everything good here is locked inside one company's app. If Paytm is already where you pay, this is one of the better free cards in the market. If it is not, there is nothing here for you.
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
₹1,500 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹3,000 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹6,000 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹18,000 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹30,000 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 — no joining fee and no annual fee
- 2 reward points per ₹100 on Paytm QR payments between ₹100 and ₹2,000 — 1% at AU's ₹0.50 redemption
- 5 points per ₹100 on Paytm Travel and Paytm Gold, and points are worth ₹1 each when taken as Gold
- Up to 12 domestic airport lounge passes a year for booking return flights on Paytm Travel — no spend gate
- Visa variant adds 2 complimentary MakeMyTrip domestic flight seats, a Times Prime annual membership and an Alaya Stays offer
Watch out
- The good Paytm UPI rate halves above ₹2,000 a transaction and falls to 1 point per ₹400 on any other UPI app
- Points are ₹0.50 on AU Rewardz and ₹1.00 only as Paytm Gold — the headline value needs one specific redemption
- AU caps the Paytm Travel and Gold rung monthly, in programme terms it does not print on the page
- Lounge QRs are generated per booking, cannot be cancelled or reversed, and cap at 4 per booking
- Everything valuable here happens inside the Paytm app; ordinary card spend pays 0.50%
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 →
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.
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
1 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
Lifetime free — "No Joining or Annual Fee". THE POINT VALUE IS CARD-SPECIFIC AND UNUSUALLY HIGH: AU prices this card's Reward Points at ₹0.50 on the AU Rewardz catalogue, twice what the same catalogue pays a Zenith or Xcite holder, and at ₹1.00 when redeemed as Paytm Gold inside the Paytm app. Earn: 2 RP per ₹100 on Paytm UPI between ₹100 and ₹2,000, halving to 1 RP above ₹2,000; 1 RP per ₹400 on UPI through any other app; 5 RP per ₹100 on Paytm Travel and Paytm Gold (monthly capping applies per AU's programme terms, whose figures the page does not print); 1 RP per ₹100 on online, offline and Paytm utility bill payments. Up to 12 domestic airport lounge passes a year earned by booking return flights on Paytm Travel — minimum ₹5,000 a round trip, maximum 4 per booking, and a QR once generated cannot be cancelled. The Visa variant adds 2 complimentary MakeMyTrip domestic flight seats up to ₹350, a Times Prime annual membership and an Alaya Stays offer. AU publishes no cross-currency mark-up for this card.
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