AU Prathama Credit Card
KeepA ₹100 first card that doubles its rate once you pass ₹5,000 a month — and asks nothing else of you.
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 states outright that 'there is no welcome benefit offered on the AU Prathama Credit Card'
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 for itself at ₹4,000 a month
At ₹4,000 a month — ₹48,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹100 gross (earn ₹100) against its ₹100 fee = ₹0 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
Prathama is built for the reader who has never held a credit card, and it is honest about being small. There is no welcome benefit — AU says so in its own FAQ rather than leaving you to find out — and no lounge access of any kind. What it does have is a sensible shape for a first card: one reward point per ₹100 to start, doubling to two on every rupee past ₹5,000 in a statement cycle, and two points flat on anything you tap rather than swipe. At AU's ₹0.25 catalogue rate that is 0.25% rising to 0.50%, which is ordinary, but the ₹100 fee is genuinely small and waives at ₹75,000 of annual spend — ₹6,250 a month, which is roughly the spend at which the doubled rate kicks in anyway. The one benefit worth naming is the recurring-payment bonus: 500 reward points, ₹125, for each standing instruction you set up on the card. Two of those and the fee is paid for. That is a deliberate nudge — get the new cardholder to park their subscriptions here so the card actually gets used — and for a first card it is the right nudge. The caveats are the usual AU ones: rent, fuel, education, government, BBPS, EMI, cash and transportation earn nothing, and points are worth ₹0.25 in a catalogue with no transfer partner. Forex is AU's ordinary 3.49% — the bank-wide MITC names Prathama in that row — so do not take it abroad expecting a break. As a starter it is fine, cheap and not misleading.
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
₹100/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹100/yr
The waiver ₹75,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹6,250 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹4,000 a month — ₹48,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹1,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹2,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹5,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹17,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹29,900 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
- 2 reward points per ₹100 on every rupee past ₹5,000 in a statement cycle, and on all contactless payments
- 500 bonus reward points (₹125) for each recurring payment you set up on the card
- ₹100 fee — AU's cheapest — waived by ₹75,000 of retail spend in the previous card anniversary year
- Lifetime-free add-on cards and EMI conversion from ₹500 a transaction
Watch out
- No welcome benefit at all — AU states it plainly
- No lounge access, airport or railway
- The doubled rate applies only to spend ABOVE ₹5,000 in a cycle, not to the whole cycle
- 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
- 3.49% cross-currency markup — AU's standard band, and this card has no travel benefit to offset it
- The fuel surcharge waiver caps at ₹100 a statement cycle
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
₹75,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹100 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 Prathama Credit Card earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹75,000 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?
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.
AU's cheapest card at ₹100 + applicable taxes, waived from the second year by ₹75,000 of retail spend. NO welcome benefit — AU answers the question directly: "No, there is no welcome benefit offered on the AU Prathama Credit Card." Earn: 1 RP per ₹100 as a floor, 2 RP per ₹100 on contactless, and 2 RP per ₹100 on INCREMENTAL spend once a statement cycle passes ₹5,000 (not retrospectively). 500 bonus RP for each recurring payment successfully set up on the card. NO lounge access. Cash, rent, education and government, EMI, fuel, BBPS, transportation and quasi-cash earn nothing; utility and telecom cap at 100 RP a transaction. Fuel surcharge waiver max ₹100 a cycle, which the bank-wide MITC agrees with. Cross-currency mark-up 3.49%: the MITC's schedule of charges names Prathama in that row. It is absent from the FAQ's lists, and reading the FAQ as the fee schedule is what produced the earlier published-absence claim here.
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 Prathama page — the 1 and 2 point per ₹100 rates, the ₹5,000 incremental threshold, the 500-point recurring-payment bonus, and the ₹100 fee with its ₹75,000 waiver
- official AU's credit-card FAQ — the AU Rewardz programme these points belong to, the add-on card rule and the 48-day interest-free period
- 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