#357

AU Tejas Credit Card

Keep

Five 10% rungs that each stop at ₹50 a month — ₹3,000 a year if you use all of them, and 0.25% if you don't.

₹1,200

a year at ₹40,000 a month, after the fee

Verified · 3 documents

Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for

What it's worth to you, after the fee

₹800
at ₹0.25L/month
₹1,200
at ₹0.4L/month
₹3,000
at ₹1L/month

Welcome: 2,000 bonus reward points (₹500) or a ₹500 brand voucher — your choice — on card activation and first transaction, plus 500 more for completing 5 transactions

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 ₹13,000 a month

At ₹13,000 a month — ₹1,56,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹400 gross (earn ₹400) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹500 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,50,000 a year = ₹400 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

AU Small Finance Bank · Not published · entry

₹500 + GST
Annual fee1
₹1,50,000 spend
Fee waiver

The take

Tejas is a coupon book with a credit card attached, and it is worth judging on that basis rather than on its earn rate. AU gives you five 10% discount rungs — Amazon Grocery, Zomato food delivery, movies on District, cab rides on Uber, Ola or Rapido, and bill payments inside the AU 0101 app — each capped at ₹50 of cashback a month. Use all five every month and that is ₹250 a month, ₹3,000 a year, against a ₹500 fee. Use two of them and it is ₹1,200. Use none and the card pays one reward point per ₹100, which is 0.25%, and you are ₹500 down. The welcome softens the first year: 2,000 points or a ₹500 voucher on activation, plus 500 more points for completing five transactions, so the fee is covered before you start. The only accelerated earn rung is a closed one — five points per ₹100, 1.25%, on transactions made through AU's own Rewardz portal, which is a shopping portal, not a spend category. There is no lounge access of any kind, the fuel surcharge waiver caps at ₹100 a cycle, and the renewal bar is ₹1.5 lakh of annual spend to avoid ₹500 — steep for a card earning a quarter of a percent. Take Tejas if you actually order Zomato, book cabs and pay bills through the AU app every month. It is a rebate scheme with a discipline requirement, and it does not pretend otherwise.

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.

₹1,50,000 annual spend erases that fee
₹13,000/mo is where the waiver, not the earn, saves it

the whole desk — your spend, what changed, the downgrade →

Keep, downgrade or cancel

₹500/yr at stake · 5 spend bands

The charge ₹500/yr

The waiver ₹1,50,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹12,500 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.

Break-even ₹13,000 a month — ₹1,56,000 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

₹800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged

₹1,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged

₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged

₹9,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged

₹15,000 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 →

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

  • 10% instant discount on Amazon Grocery, Zomato, District movies, cab services and AU 0101 bill payments — five rungs, ₹50 a month each
  • 2,000 reward points or a ₹500 brand voucher on activation, plus 500 more for 5 transactions
  • 5 reward points per ₹100 (1.25%) on spends made through the AU Rewardz portal
  • ₹500 fee, waived by ₹1,50,000 of retail spend in the previous card anniversary year

Watch out

  • 3.49% cross-currency markup — AU's standard band, and this card has no travel benefit to offset it
  • Every partner rung caps at ₹50 of cashback a month — ₹3,000 a year if you use all five, and nothing if you use none
  • Base earn is 1 reward point per ₹100, which is 0.25% at AU's catalogue rate
  • No first-year fee waiver: AU states 'there is no joining fee waiver on the AU Tejas Credit Card'
  • No lounge access, airport or railway
  • The only accelerated earn rung is inside AU's own Rewardz portal, not in the open market
  • 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

₹1,50,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹500 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 Tejas Credit Card earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹1,50,000 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.

Route Direct application
Income · salaried not published
Income · self-employed not published
Age band not published

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.

Forex markup 3.49% of the transaction amount
APR not published
Late fee not published
Cash advance not published
Add-on card Nil — up to 3 lifetime-free add-on cards
Overlimit not published
Redemption fee not published

₹500 + applicable taxes with no first-year waiver — AU states "there is no joining fee waiver on the AU Tejas Credit Card" — and a ₹1,50,000 renewal bar. The welcome is 2,000 Reward Points or a ₹500 brand voucher, plus 500 more for completing 5 transactions. The card is a coupon book: FIVE separate 10% rungs, each capped at ₹50 of cashback a month — Amazon Grocery, Zomato food delivery, District movies, cab services and AU 0101 bill payments — so ₹250 a month, ₹3,000 a year, if every one is used. Base earn is 1 RP per ₹100; the only accelerated rung is 5 RP per ₹100 inside AU's own rewardz.au.bank.in portal, which is a shopping portal rather than a spend category. NO lounge access of any kind. Fuel surcharge waiver max ₹100 a cycle, which is what the bank-wide MITC prices Tejas at too. Cross-currency mark-up 3.49%: the MITC's schedule of charges names Tejas 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

Full tracker →

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 2026
    Buff moderate AU Small Finance Bank
    AU 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 2026
    Launch minor AU Small Finance Bank
    AU relaunches its card range — Ananta tops a new four-card deck
  • 10 Apr 2026
    Lounge minor AU Small Finance Bank
    AU more than doubles its domestic-lounge spend gate to ₹50,000/quarter
  • 1 Apr 2026
    Devaluation minor AU Small Finance Bank
    AU stops paying reward points on transportation merchant codes
  • 22 Dec 2024
    Devaluation moderate AU Small Finance Bank
    AU rewrites where the ixigo co-brand earns — four categories to nil, three to a reduced rate
  • 1 Apr 2024
    Devaluation moderate AU Small Finance Bank
    AU zeroes out rewards on fuel, rent, education and government
  • 21 Mar 2024
    Launch minor AU Small Finance Bank
    AU unveils Zenith+ — a metal card built for the departure gate
  • 5 Jul 2023
    Devaluation major AU Small Finance Bank
    AU Rewardz devalues vouchers 20% and tolls every redemption
    E-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.