AU Zenith+
CancelAU's low-forex lounge machine — 0.99% abroad, 32 lounge visits, a rewards rate that isn't one.
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: Luxury gift vouchers or reward points worth ₹5,000 on activation
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 ₹71,000 a month
At ₹71,000 a month — ₹8,52,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹2,000 gross (earn ₹2,000) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹4,999 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹8,00,000 a year = ₹2,000 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 closest AU gets to a serious travel card, and it earns the title on two lines of the brochure: a 0.99% forex markup — the lowest of any AU card and cheaper than most full-service banks — and a genuinely fat lounge stack, 16 domestic and 16 international (Priority Pass) visits a year plus four Meet & Assist services and eight golf games. Then the rewards collapse: 1 point per ₹100 at AU's ₹0.25 catalogue value is 0.25%, the accelerated dining/travel band is a whole 0.5%, and the ₹75,000-a-month milestone drips 1,000 points (₹250). What changed in Jun-2025 is the one thing AU points never had: Zenith+ — and Zenith+ alone across AU's deck — now transfers to Air India Maharaja Club at 3:2, ₹0.67 a point at the mile anchor, nearly 3× the catalogue. It doesn't turn 0.25% base earn into a rewards card, but it does lift Zenith+ out of the closed loop every other AU card is still stuck in. At ₹4,999 you're buying lounges, a cheap forex rate and that Maharaja escape hatch — a free Wealth or a ₹2,999 Vetta gets you the lounges but not the transfer. Take it if you fly enough to drain 32 lounge visits, want the 0.99% abroad, or will actually route points to Air India; otherwise 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
₹4,999/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹4,999/yr
The waiver ₹8,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹66,667 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹71,000 a month — ₹8,52,000 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
−₹4,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
−₹3,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹19,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹24,600 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
- Only AU card that isn't closed-loop: 3:2 transfer to Air India Maharaja Club (₹0.67/pt), live since Jun-2025
- 0.99% forex markup — the lowest across AU's entire lineup
- 16 domestic + 16 international (Priority Pass) lounge visits a year
- 4 Meet & Assist airport services + 8 complimentary golf games/lessons a year
- Complimentary Taj Epicure membership at ₹12L of net retail spend in an anniversary year
- 16 BookMyShow buy-one-get-one movie/event tickets a year (4 a quarter, up to ₹500 off the second)
Watch out
- 0.25% base earn at AU's honest ₹0.25 point; even dining/travel is only 0.5%
- The Maharaja 3:2 is the only escape — every other redemption is the ₹99 + GST closed catalogue, points expire in 24 months
- ₹4,999 fee, waived only at ₹8L spend; the milestone pays ₹250 at ₹75k/month, and utility, insurance, transport, rent, education/govt, fuel, cash and EMI spends don't count toward it
- AU markets the point at ₹1 — the catalogue redeems it at a quarter of that
- Priority Pass is chargeable inside India — the 16 international visits are for lounges abroad
- The lounge list AU prints for Zenith+ is a dead link — lms.hoi.in/lounge-list/au-premium-creditcard renders "No data found." AU's typo, one missing hyphen: the real list is 51 rooms, the standard 50 plus BLR T1's 080 Domestic VIP
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 · 3 pay zero
Zenith+ earns 1 RP/₹100 general, 2 RP/₹100 on dining/travel/international. Utility/telecom, insurance, education & govt and rent DO earn 1 RP/₹100 but share a 1,000-RP-per-cycle cap; the true zero list is cash/EMI/fuel/transportation/BBPS/quasi-cash (official page, re-verified 2026-07-26). Points redeem at ₹0.25 — AU markets them at ₹1. Monthly milestone: 1,000 RP at ₹75k retail.
- Fuel · excluded Zero RP (official exclusion list); 1% surcharge waiver; 1% fair-usage fee past slabs (official KFS)
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero RP on wallet loads since 1-Apr-2024
- Rent & property management · reduced 1 RP/₹100 inside the shared 1,000-RP/cycle cap (official earn table); AU publishes no split of that ceiling, so none of it belongs to rent alone; 1% fee on domestic rentals, min ₹99 (official KFS)
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · reduced 1 RP/₹100 (0.25%) inside the shared 1,000-RP/cycle cap; AU publishes no split of that ceiling, so none of it belongs to utilities alone; 1% fee past ₹50k/month (official KFS)
per AU Small Finance Bank T&C · rank every card by spend category →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹8,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹4,999 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 and the milestones — the ₹8,00,000 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: No spend gate — AU's usage T&C applies the ₹50,000 quarterly-spend criterion to "AU Zenith, Vetta, Xcite Ace, Xcite Ultra, SPONT, NOMO, ABCL Pro credit cardholders only", and Zenith+ is in neither that list nor the domestic quota table
Opens 696 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 283 airports , via Priority Pass Global — see the full map →
Memberships included
1 included · ₹7,500/yr
- Taj Epicure (IHCL) ₹29,500 ₹7,500milestone complimentary Taj Epicure membership on minimum NET RETAIL spends of ₹12 lakh in a card anniversary year; nothing below that
Not counted in our net-value math above — worth ₹7,500 a year only if you'd actually use it. Sticker prices struck through; our number assumes you show up. The full matrix →
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.
A normal application, but a documented one: unlike AU's document-light Swipe-Up flow, Zenith+ wants the full file — bank statements, salary slips or account-aggregator data — with TechnoFino application threads clustering around ₹2.5L/month salary, a ~₹30L ITR, or a ₹5L+ limit on an existing card elsewhere. The two cheaper doors, both commonly reported: corporate employee-benefit tie-ups that issue it lifetime-free, and converting an AU card older than three months (₹199 + GST) once your profile catches up.
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 ₹4,999 joining and annual, waived at ₹8L spend. The only AU card with 0.99% forex and the gentler 1.99%/mo finance-charge tier. Same bank-wide fair-usage fees as Ananta (rent 1% min ₹99, utility 1% past ₹50k/month, fuel/transportation 1% past their slabs). 16 domestic + 16 Priority Pass international lounge visits a year; 4 Meet & Assist. AU publishes no income cutoff for Zenith+; 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 — 11 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — ₹4,999 fee / ₹8L second-year waiver, 0.99% forex, 2/1 earn with the 1,000-RP cycle cap on utility-insurance-rent-govt
- official Schedule of Charges / KFS v1.8 (7-Jul-2026) — 0.99% forex, ₹4,999 fee, 1.99%/mo (23.88% p.a.) APR tier, zero cash-withdrawal fee on Zenith+, ₹1,000/mo fuel-waiver cap
- community CardInsider review (19-May-2026)
- official Air India — AU conversion table: Zenith+ 1.5:1 (= 3:2), all other listed AU cards 6:1; min transfer 1.5 RP, multiples of 1.5; Partner page live since Jun-2025
- community CardInsider — AU/YES/IndusInd join Maharaja Club (Zenith+ 3:2, other AU cards 6:1; published 22-Jul-2025, not Jun-2026 as we previously dated it)
- community TechnoFino — LIT/Vetta/Zenith/Zenith+ RuPay-variant launch (BINs)
- community CardInsider — AU RuPay card list (Zenith+ on RuPay)
- community TechnoFino — application docs (statements/payslips/Anumati) + reported eligibility bars
- community TechnoFino — LTF via corporate employee-benefit tie-ups
- official AU Usage T&C (w.e.f. 10-Apr-2026) — Zenith+ is exempt from the ₹50,000 spend gate and sent to its own lounge list, not the 50-room standard one
- official AU's cited lounge list for Zenith+ — the URL AU prints renders "No data found."; the list it meant is one hyphen away and holds 51 rooms