AU Xcite Ace Credit Card
Keep1%, 2% or 3% depending on how much you spend — and ₹600 a month is where all three stop.
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 Xcite Ace
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 ₹8,000 a month
At ₹8,000 a month — ₹96,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,000 gross (earn ₹1,000) against its ₹749 fee = ₹200 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #363
Why #363 Offered only through AU's SwipeUp upgrade programme rather than on public application. It ranks on what it pays a holder AU invites — and its cashback is a staircase, so at ₹20,000 a month it is a 3% card and at ₹7,000 a month it is a 0% one.
The take
Xcite Ace turns cashback into a staircase. Spend ₹7,500 in a statement cycle and the whole cycle earns 1%; ₹12,500 and it earns 2%; ₹20,000 and it earns 3%. That is a genuinely good structure for a disciplined spender — there is no category to remember, no merchant list, and the rate applies to everything eligible. Then AU prints the number that governs it: maximum cashback per statement cycle is ₹600. At the 3% rung that ceiling arrives at exactly ₹20,000 of spend, the same figure that unlocked the rung, so the card pays ₹600 a month at best and every rupee past ₹20,000 earns nothing. ₹7,200 a year against a ₹749 fee that waives at ₹2 lakh of annual spend. What is around it justifies the fee on its own: two complimentary domestic airport lounge visits a quarter — gated since 10 April 2026 on ₹50,000 of spend in the previous quarter, which is a real bar for a card whose earn stops at ₹20,000 a month — eight railway lounge visits a year, ₹50 lakh of air accident cover, ₹2 lakh of credit shield and ₹25,000 of purchase protection. The exclusion list is the usual AU one and it is wide: wallets, rent, education, government, fuel, EMI and BBPS neither earn nor count toward the milestone. Take Ace if you spend ₹20,000 a month and no more; above that, Xcite Ultra keeps paying and this one does not.
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
₹749/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹749/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 ₹8,000 a month — ₹96,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹7,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹7,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹7,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹7,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹7,200 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
- 1% cashback at ₹7,500 of monthly spend, 2% at ₹12,500 and 3% at ₹20,000 — applied to the whole cycle
- 2 complimentary domestic airport lounge visits a quarter, plus 8 railway lounge visits a year
- ₹50 lakh air accident cover, ₹2 lakh credit shield and ₹25,000 of purchase protection
- ₹749 fee, waived by ₹2,00,000 of retail spend in the previous card anniversary year
Watch out
- Cashback stops at ₹600 a statement cycle — at the 3% rung that is ₹20,000 of spend, after which the card pays nothing
- SwipeUp only — AU offers this as an upgrade to existing cardholders, not through a public application
- The lounge gate is ₹50,000 of spend in the previous quarter, well above the ₹20,000 a month at which the cashback stops
- Miss ₹7,500 in a cycle and that cycle earns zero — the bands are all-or-nothing, not marginal
- Wallet reloads, cash, rent, education and government, EMI, fuel, BBPS and quasi-cash neither earn nor count toward the 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 →
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 ₹749 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 Xcite Ace 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
71 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: ₹50,000 of net retail spend in the previous calendar quarter for the airport visits (w.e.f. 10 Apr 2026); the railway visits carry no gate
Opens 71 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 32 airports and 19 railway stations , via DreamFolks Railway — 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.
Invite-only — there is no public application form. The bank calls you.
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.
SwipeUp upgrade programme only. Product page prints ₹749 + applicable taxes with a ₹2,00,000 renewal waiver, against AU's bank-wide FAQ calling the Xcite series lifetime free. SETTLED 2026-08-23 by the bank-wide MITC (v2.21, 7 Jul 2026), whose fee grid prints "Xcite ACE ₹ 749" and whose lifetime-free row omits the Xcite series entirely: the FAQ is stale, the schedule of charges governs. A CASHBACK STAIRCASE, not a per-swipe rate: the whole statement cycle earns 1% at ₹7,500 of spend, 2% at ₹12,500 and 3% at ₹20,000, and total cashback stops at ₹600 a cycle — so the 3% band is exhausted at the very spend that unlocks it. Wallet reloads, cash, rent, education and government, EMI, fuel, BBPS and quasi-cash are excluded from the milestone calculation entirely. 2 domestic airport lounge visits a quarter behind ₹50,000 of previous-quarter spend (rule effective 10 Apr 2026), plus 8 railway lounge visits a year. Air accident cover ₹50 lakh, credit shield ₹2 lakh, purchase protection ₹25,000.
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 Xcite Ace page — the 1%/2%/3% monthly-spend cashback staircase, the ₹600-a-cycle ceiling, the quarterly lounge entitlement and the ₹749 fee with its ₹2,00,000 waiver
- official AU's credit-card FAQ — the 3.49% cross-currency mark-up covering the SwipeUp Xcite series, and the lifetime-free line that contradicts the Xcite product pages
- official AU Usage T&C (w.e.f. 10-Apr-2026) — Xcite Ace named in the domestic quota table at 2 visits a quarter, on AU's own 50+ room list; ₹50,000 prior-quarter gate
- 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 fee grid that prices the Xcite series, and whose lifetime-free row does not include it