Times Card from Barclaycard and TimesofMoney
CancelPage 3 parties, premieres and a Visa Gold that cost nothing to keep.
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
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 from the first rupee
At ₹1,000 a month — ₹12,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹100 gross (earn ₹100) against its ₹0 fee = ₹100 net — at or above ₹0 from the first rung we price. 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.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #920
Why #920 A free-for-life entertainment co-brand with a newspaper group — concerts, premieres, resort packages — and the one Barclaycard whose own page admits it revolved dearer than its siblings. Carried for the record; Barclays left Indian consumer cards.
The take
The Times Card was Barclaycard India's co-brand with TimesofMoney, the payments arm of the Times of India group, and it sold exactly what a newspaper group could sell: access to the entertainment listings it already owned. Invitations to live concerts and Page 3 parties, discounts on the latest releases and high-profile shows, dining at premium restaurants, holiday resorts and weekend packages, and offers at salons, spas, fitness centres, health clinics and dance academies. It was a Visa Gold, it was free for life, and it earned BarclaycardPoints on every swipe into the same voucher catalogue as the Gold and the Yatra Platinum. The card has a small identity problem worth recording, because it is the kind of thing that turns into two entries on a board that is not paying attention. Barclaycard shipped it under two URLs and two names — times-barclaycard-gold.html and times-card.html, "Times Barclaycard Gold" on the points page and "Times Card from Barclaycard and TimesofMoney" in the page titles of both. Read the pages and it is one product throughout: same free-for-life fee, same 3.1% monthly interest, same TimesofMoney partner, same benefit list. One card, two names, and it is filed here once. What separated it from the rest of the shelf, for a while, was the interest rate. Its own pages say 3.1% a month and 37.2% a year in both 2008 and 2009, where the Gold, the Smart Budget, the football card and the Yatra Platinum all advertised 2.95% and 35.4%. Whatever the entertainment access was worth, the Times Card charged for it in the one place a free card can — until the shelf caught up with it. Barclaycard's own Most Important Terms and Conditions, effective 1 January 2010, sets ONE interest model for every card it prices: "Boarding Rate: i.e. in the first 3 months of Card issuance is fixed at 3.1% (monthly) or 37.2%", repriced every six months thereafter between 2.5% and 3.7% a month. Its tariff table has exactly two columns, "Other Barclaycards" and "For Barclaycard Platinum", and neither carries a card-specific rate. So the Times Card was dearer than its siblings on the product pages of 2008–09, and no dearer than any of them from 2010.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card is lifetime free. There is no fee due, no renewal to weigh, and nothing to cancel to save.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
nothing due at the anniversary · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 — lifetime free
At your spend
₹2,400 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹4,800 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹9,600 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹28,800 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹48,000 a year at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
Everyday earn plus milestones, with no fee to subtract — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
The downgrade
Barclays 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.
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
- Free for life — no joining fee and no annual fee, on both product-page captures and in Barclaycard's own tariff schedule
- A Visa Gold, stated on the card's own page
- Invitations to live concerts and premieres, and discounts on the latest releases and high-profile shows
- Discounts on holiday resorts and weekend packages, and at premium restaurants, pubs and clubs
- BarclaycardPoints on every swipe, into the same voucher catalogue as the Gold and the Yatra Platinum
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — Barclays wound down its Indian consumer credit-card business and barclaycard.in no longer serves a product page
- It revolved dearer than its siblings on the 2008–09 product pages — 3.1% a month and 37.2% a year against their advertised 2.95% and 35.4% — but not after 1 January 2010, when Barclaycard's shelf-wide MITC set 3.1% as the boarding rate for every card it prices
- The interest rate was then REPRICED on you every six months, anywhere from 2.5% to 3.7% a month, on your usage and credit-bureau record
- The benefits were discounts and invitations from a media partner, not a contractual entitlement
- No lounge access and no travel benefit beyond resort discounts, and 3.5% on foreign currency
- Redemption needed a minimum of 1,250 BarclaycardPoints — ₹500 of value had to pile up before anything could be claimed at all
- 0.80% is the whole return, and the entertainment access was discounts and invitations rather than a bonus earn rate
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes BarclaycardPoints 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 →
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.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot. Barclays exited Indian consumer credit cards in the early 2010s and barclaycard.in has not served this product page for well over a decade.
Barclays Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
no MITC row researched for this card yet · filter the board by what you can get →
What's changed for this card
nothing tracked yet — which is itself a fact
No tracked devaluations or changes yet — this card's history starts here.
Verified against Barclays 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 Barclaycard India's Times Card page (archived 15-Dec-2009) — the Visa Gold statement, the free-for-life fee, the 3.1% monthly interest and the entertainment benefit list
- official Barclaycard India's Most Important Terms and Conditions, effective 1 January 2010 — the 3.1% boarding rate that applied to the whole shelf, not to this card alone
- official The same card's earlier page under its other URL (archived 21-Apr-2008) — one product, two names, with the same free-for-life fee and the same 3.1% monthly rate
- official Barclaycard India's BarclaycardPoints page and redemption catalogue (archived 20-Dec-2009) — the earn rate, the ₹500-voucher price and the 1,250-point redemption floor
- official Barclays Bank PLC India's own site today — its Indian lines of business are Private Banking and Investment Banking, and it sells no consumer card at all