AU Zenith
Cancel₹7,999 for 0.75% and a lounge stack a ₹2,999 card matches — AU's priciest, and its worst value.
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 pulled the old ₹1,000-voucher + 10,000-point welcome; the page has sold Zenith with no sign-up bonus since at least Nov-2025
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied: it earns nothing on fuel here, so that spend is dropped, not paid at the headline, and stops pacing milestones and the waiver. 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 ₹45,000 a month
At ₹45,000 a month — ₹5,40,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹3,500 gross (earn ₹3,500) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹7,999 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹5,00,000 a year = ₹3,500 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 · the network variants
The take
Zenith is the confusing one: it costs ₹7,999 — more than the Zenith+ that sits above it in the name — yet forfeits the 0.99% forex (this one charges 1.99% until 1 Oct 2026, then 3.49%) and the golf, keeping a 24×7 concierge and a smaller lounge sheet in return. What you actually get is 8 domestic visits a year gated on ₹50,000 a quarter (AU's bank-wide bar since 10-Apr-2026) and 8 international via Priority Pass — the railway-lounge line quietly fell off AU's page in early 2026, and the old welcome (₹1,000 voucher + 10,000 points) is gone with it. The earn is AU's best but that's a low bar: 3 points per ₹100 is 0.75% at the ₹0.25 catalogue value, standalone restaurants, international spend, groceries and departmental stores reach 1.25%, and the ₹50,000-a-cycle milestone drips 1,000 points (₹250). AU joined Air India Maharaja Club in Jun-2025, but Zenith converts at a punitive 6:1 — ₹0.17 a point, worse than the catalogue — so the good 3:2 route went to the cheaper Zenith+ and Zenith is left with a decoy. A 24-month expiry and a ₹99 redemption toll finish the job. The fee does waive — ₹1.25L in 90 days year one, ₹5L a year after — but at that spend a lifetime-free Wealth or a ₹2,999 Vetta gives you comparable lounge access and keeps the ₹7,999. Cancel.
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.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹7,999/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹7,999/yr
The waiver ₹5,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹41,667 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹45,000 a month — ₹5,40,000 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
−₹6,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹3,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹10,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹26,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹42,300 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
- 10 Apr 2026 AU more than doubles its domestic-lounge spend gate to ₹50,000/quarter
- 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
- 0.75% base / 1.25% on standalone restaurants, international spend, grocery and departmental stores — AU's highest earn rate
- Year one is the cheap year to test it: the ₹7,999 fee waives at ₹1,25,000 of retail spend within 90 days of card set-up, against ₹5,00,000 an anniversary year from year two
- 8 domestic + 8 international (Priority Pass) lounge visits a year
- 24×7 global concierge service
- 2,500-point birthday bonus (₹625) — one retail swipe on your birthday
Watch out
- ₹7,999 fee — the steepest in AU's lineup; the waiver bar is ₹5L a year (₹1.25L in 90 days year one)
- 1.99% forex until 1 Oct 2026, then 3.49% — AU's own page prints the revision — and no golf. Zenith+ stays at 0.99%
- From 1 Oct 2026 the 1% fuel-surcharge waiver drops from ₹1,000 to ₹100 a statement cycle, on transactions of ₹400–₹5,000
- Near-closed loop: the lone transfer, Air India Maharaja Club at 6:1, is worse than the ₹0.25 catalogue; ₹99 + GST redemption fee, 24-month point expiry
- Domestic lounges need ₹50k spend the previous quarter (AU raised the bar from ₹20k on 10-Apr-2026)
- Quietly stripped in 2025-26: the welcome (₹1,000 voucher + 10,000 points) and the railway-lounge visits are both gone from AU's page
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 →
What earns, what doesn't
14 sourced rules · 6 pay zero
Zenith earns 3 RP/₹100 general, 5 RP/₹100 on dining/international/grocery, inside AU's 1-Apr-2024 exclusion regime. Points redeem at ₹0.25 — AU markets them at ₹1. Statement-cycle milestone: 1,000 RP at ₹50k.
- Fuel · excluded Zero RP (bank-wide since 1-Apr-2024); 1% surcharge waiver; 1% fee past slabs
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero RP; 1% fee on domestic rentals, min ₹99 (bank-wide KFS)
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero RP on wallet loads since 1-Apr-2024
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · reduced 1 RP/₹100, capped 100 RP/txn (official product page); 1% fee past ₹50k/month
per AU Small Finance Bank T&C (community-sourced) · rank every card by spend category →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹5,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹7,999 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 Zenith earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹5,00,000 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.
Where the miles go
1 program · 0 live
Ratios read card points : partner miles — 2:1 means 2 points become 1 mile. Never the other way round.
Lounge access
696 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: ₹50,000 of net retail spend in the previous calendar quarter (raised from ₹20k on 10-Apr-2026); primary cardholders only
Opens 696 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 283 airports , via Priority Pass Global — see the full map →
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
7 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
Fee ₹7,999 joining and annual — the steepest in AU's lineup, above the Zenith+ it's named after. Joining fee waived at ₹1.25L retail spend in 90 days; renewal waived at ₹5L in the previous anniversary year. 1.99% forex (vs Zenith+'s 0.99%) and no golf; keeps a 24×7 concierge. 8 domestic + 8 railway + 8 international (Priority Pass) lounge visits a year. Same bank-wide fair-usage fees. AU publishes no income cutoff; age from community.
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 — 8 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — ₹7,999 fee, ₹1.25L/90-day and ₹5L waivers, 1.99% forex becomes 3.49% on 1 Oct 2026, 5x standalone restaurants, international, grocery and departmental stores, 8+8 lounges, no welcome
- community CardInsider review — its 25,000 RP/cycle overall cap is NOT in AU's own terms, and its welcome and railway-lounge lines are stale too
- official AU Usage T&C revision (10-Apr-2026) — domestic lounge gate ₹50k/quarter; Zenith 2 domestic + 2 intl PP per quarter
- community Paisabazaar listing (fee waiver ₹1.25L/90d Y1, ₹5L renewal re-verified; lists no welcome benefit — corroborates the pull)
- official Air India — AU conversion table (Zenith 6:1 decoy, Zenith+ 1.5:1). Partner page live since Jun-2025; IN-locale copy 404s in 2026 — JP locale still serves it
- community CardInsider — AU joins Maharaja Club (Zenith at 6:1 decoy, Zenith+ 3:2; published 22-Jul-2025, not Jun-2026 as we previously dated it)
- community TechnoFino — LIT/Vetta/Zenith/Zenith+ RuPay-variant launch (BINs)
- community DesiDime — Zenith/Zenith+ RuPay-variant launch