AU Xcite Ultra Credit Card
Keep2% online, 1% everywhere else and eight airport lounges — the best AU card that is not for sale.
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 as such — instead a recurring 500 bonus reward points (₹125) for ₹5,000 of retail spend made between the 1st and the 5th of every calendar month
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 ₹5,000 a month
At ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹2,100 gross (earn ₹600 + bonuses ₹1,500) against its ₹749 fee = ₹1,400 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #362
Why #362 Offered only through AU's SwipeUp upgrade programme, not on public application, so a reader cannot choose it. It ranks on what it pays a holder AU invites — a 2% online rate and eight airport lounge visits a year for ₹749 that waives at ₹2 lakh.
The take
Xcite Ultra is the top of AU's SwipeUp upgrade ladder and, for ₹749, it out-earns cards that cost five times as much. Eight reward points per ₹100 online is 2.0% at AU's ₹0.25 catalogue rate; four points offline is a clean 1.0%; twelve points on international spend reads as 3.0%, although AU's 3.49% cross-currency markup takes most of that back, so treat the foreign rung as a wash rather than a reason to travel with it. On top: 500 bonus points every month you put ₹5,000 through between the 1st and the 5th — ₹1,500 a year for timing your bills — and 5,000 points, ₹1,250, at ₹2.5 lakh of annual spend. The travel content is real: two complimentary domestic airport lounge visits a quarter, eight a year, gated since 10 April 2026 on ₹50,000 of spend in the previous quarter, plus eight railway lounge visits and ₹20 lakh of air accident cover. The fee waives at ₹2 lakh a year, which is roughly the spend at which the lounge gate is also met. What holds it back is the currency: AU Reward Points are worth ₹0.25 in the catalogue and this card reaches no transfer partner, so a 2% online rate is 2% of shopping vouchers, not of airline miles. And you cannot apply — AU issues the Xcite series as an upgrade, so the only route in is an existing AU card and an invitation.
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 ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹5,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹8,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹14,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹38,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹62,800 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
- 8 reward points per ₹100 (2.0%) online, 4 (1.0%) offline and 12 (3.0%) on international spends
- 2 complimentary domestic airport lounge visits a quarter, plus 8 railway lounge visits a year
- 500 bonus points every calendar month you spend ₹5,000 between the 1st and the 5th
- 5,000 bonus points (₹1,250) at ₹2.5 lakh of retail spend in a card anniversary year
- ₹749 fee, waived by ₹2,00,000 of retail spend in the previous card anniversary year
Watch out
- SwipeUp only — AU offers this as an upgrade to existing cardholders, not through a public application
- The airport-lounge benefit needs ₹50,000 of spend in the previous calendar quarter, a rule AU introduced on 10 Apr 2026
- The 12X international rung is largely cancelled by AU's own 3.49% forex markup
- 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 and quasi-cash earn nothing, and transportation MCCs stopped earning on 1 Apr 2026
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 ₹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 Ultra Credit Card earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — 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 the bank-wide FAQ's lifetime-free line. SETTLED 2026-08-23 by the bank-wide MITC (v2.21, 7 Jul 2026), whose fee grid prints "Xcite Ultra ₹ 749" and whose lifetime-free row omits the Xcite series: the FAQ is stale. Earn: 4 RP per ₹100 offline, 8 online, 12 on international spends (which AU's own 3.49% mark-up largely cancels), 1 on utility, telecom and insurance capped 100 RP a transaction. 500 bonus RP for ₹5,000 of retail spend between the 1st and 5th of each calendar month; 5,000 RP at ₹2.5 lakh in a card anniversary year, taken as brand vouchers. 2 domestic airport lounge visits a quarter behind ₹50,000 of previous-quarter spend (effective 10 Apr 2026) plus 8 railway lounge visits a year. Air accident cover up to ₹20 lakh. Transportation MCCs stopped earning on 1 Apr 2026 — AU's Xcite-series wording is "With effect from 1st April 2026, Reward Points accrual on Transportation Merchant Category Codes will be discontinued", quoted verbatim on the sibling pages. The 10-Apr date carried here until 2026-08-23 was the LOUNGE rule's effective date, which is a different change.
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 Ultra page — the 4/8/12 points per ₹100 grid, the quarterly lounge entitlement and its ₹50,000 gate, the ₹2.5 lakh milestone 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 Ultra 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