BOBCARD EMPOWER
KeepFree to take, ₹500 a year that ₹50,000 reverses — and a 5X rung two documents disagree about.
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: 500 reward points (₹125) on ₹5,000 of spend within 60 days of card issuance
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 — and a business card's accelerator is usually the point. This card is not on the board, which ranks personal cards only; it is ranked against other business cards on /best/business, where the tax, GST and vendor-payment rungs ARE credited and its ₹ 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 ₹5,000 a month
At ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹200 gross (earn ₹200) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹500 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹50,000 a year = ₹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 #473
Why #473 A business card carried, not ranked. What it is: BOBCARD's card for sole proprietors — free to take, ₹500 a year that ₹50,000 of spend reverses, a quarter of a per cent on everything, and a 5X utilities rung the bank's product page promises and its own rewards T&C twice denies.
The take
EMPOWER is the card BOBCARD sells to sole proprietors and the self-employed: apply with a GSTIN and a GST return, get your business name embossed on a fourth line, and receive categorised statements you can hand an accountant. Nothing to take it out, ₹500 a year to keep it, and ₹50,000 of spend in an anniversary year — about ₹4,200 a month — reverses that entirely. Fifty interest-free days and EMI conversion above ₹2,500 are the working-capital case, and they are the honest reason to hold it. What it pays is a quarter of a per cent: one reward point per ₹100, redeemed as cashback at BOBCARD's flat ₹0.25, uncapped, plus 500 welcome points on ₹5,000 of spend inside 60 days. And here the bank contradicts itself. The product page advertises "5X Reward point, i.e. 5 Reward Points for every ₹100 spent on Utility (MCC 4900)", capped at 1,000 points a statement. BOBCARD's own regulatory rewards T&C, dated 15 July 2026, says the opposite twice over: EMPOWER has no row in the accelerated table at all, and the section closes with "Accelerated Reward points benefit is not available on Prime, Corporate and Empower Credit Cards" — under a bullet that already excludes MCC 4900 from every card's accelerated tier. We price the core rate and print the disagreement rather than bury it. There is no lounge access — EMPOWER is absent from BOBCARD's sixteen-row lounge table — and no reduced forex, so a foreign supplier payment costs the full 3.5%. Flights booked inside BOBCARD's SmartDeal portal pay four EXTRA points per ₹100 and hotels ten, on top of the core rate. Treat it as an expense card with a free entry price, not as a rewards card.
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
₹500/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 joining, then ₹500/yr
The waiver ₹50,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹4,167 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, and it gets there by erasing the fee at the waiver rather than out-earning it.
At your spend
₹800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹9,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹15,000 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
BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda) 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
- 25 Aug 2026 BOBCARD withdraws accidental death cover from twenty cards issuer-wide
- 15 Jul 2026 BOBCARD nearly doubles the spend gate on unlimited domestic lounges issuer-wide
- 1 Apr 2026 BOBCARD reprices rail, toll and app-routed education 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
- No joining fee — BOBCARD's KFS prints NIL against the whole first-year line
- ₹500 a year, fully reversed by ₹50,000 of spend in an anniversary year
- 1 reward point per ₹100 with no earning cap, redeemed as cashback at ₹0.25 a point
- 500 welcome points on ₹5,000 of spend inside 60 days
- Your business name embossed on a fourth line, and categorised statements for expense tracking
- Up to 50 interest-free days, and EMI conversion on purchases above ₹2,500 over 6 to 48 months
Watch out
- BOBCARD CONTRADICTS ITSELF on the 5X utilities rung: the product page promises it, the 15 Jul 2026 rewards T&C excludes EMPOWER from accelerated points by name — we price only the core rate
- 0.25% on ordinary spend, which is the floor of BOBCARD's book
- No lounge access — EMPOWER is not in BOBCARD's lounge-eligibility table
- No reduced forex — the 3.5% catch-all markup applies to every foreign payment
- Sole proprietors and self-employed only; income proof is a GSTIN and the latest GST return
- Closed loop: points redeem as cashback at ₹0.25, expire in two years and carry no transfer partner
- Fuel and the Annexure-1 MCCs earn nothing
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes BOBCARD 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
₹50,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹500 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. BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda) states what the BOBCARD EMPOWER earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹50,000 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
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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda) 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
6 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.
- 25 Aug 2026BOBCARD withdraws accidental death cover from twenty cardsAir and Non-Air Accidental Death Cover bundled with Eterna, Eterna (FD), Premier, Premier (FD), Select, Select (FD), Tiara, Empower Business, Corporate Platinum, Swavlamban, Prime, Elite, Platinum Select, Signature, Assure, Renaissance and the three Pragati RRB variants. → No Air or Non-Air Accidental Death Cover. Already gone on anything issued after 15 July 2026; existing cardholders keep it only until 25 August 2026.
BOBCARD's July revision notice has a quiet fourth clause, and it lands on 25 August 2026: the Air and Non-Air Accidental Death Cover comes off twenty product variants at once — not just new cards, but every card already in a wallet. Cards issued after 15 July 2026 never had it. Call it minor and mean it, because this desk does not price the perk and neither should you: air-accident death cover is the benefit every Indian issuer prints in bold and nobody ever claims, it pays only on death in a common carrier, and it costs the issuer almost nothing precisely because it almost never pays. Losing it changes no number on this site. What it signals is the direction: the same notice already moved the unlimited-domestic-lounge gate on Eterna, Eterna (FD), Tiara and Varunah Premium from ₹40,000 to ₹75,000 of preceding-quarter spend, and raised the finance charge on Eterna and Tiara from 3.25% to 3.75% a month. The insurance line is the third cut in one PDF, and it is the one that reaches cards nobody thought were being repriced. ON THE LOUNGE DATE, because BOBCARD published three answers and two of them are still live. The 12 June notice set the ₹75,000 gate for 15 July 2026. Four days later, on 16 June, BOBCARD issued an ADDENDUM — "This communication serves as an addendum to our earlier communication on Friday 12th June 2026" — that DEFERRED the lounge change alone: "₹40,000 in preceding calendar quarter" applicable till 30 September 2026, "₹75,000" from 1 October 2026, with the finance-charge and HPCL clauses left at 15 July. Then the operative Features and Rewards T&C dated 15 July 2026 — which POSTDATES the addendum — prints §5.1 Table1 as "Eterna / Unlimited / Rs. 75,000 in preceding calendar quarter", with no date qualifier and no ₹40,000 anywhere, and BOBCARD's product pages agree. The operative document governs, so ₹75,000 is what this desk carries on all four cards; the addendum is recorded here because a reader who reads the addendum and not the T&C will believe they have until October, ; the ₹75,000 gate is the one that applies.
- 5 Aug 2026Etihad Guest Gold now costs ₹10,000 on etihad.com, not one rupee
- 15 Jul 2026BOBCARD nearly doubles the spend gate on unlimited domestic lounges
- 5 May 2026Eterna's lifetime-free window rolls forward yet again
- 1 Apr 2026BOBCARD reprices rail, toll and app-routed education
- 5 Jan 2026BOBCARD and Etihad Guest deal two co-brands — the last pipe in
Every BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda) change we've dated → 6 events in 2026, 4 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda)'s own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official BOBCARD's EMPOWER product page — 'Zero Joining Fee. Annual Fee of ₹500 waived on anniversary spends of ₹50,000', the 1 point per ₹100 core rate at ₹0.25, and the proprietor-only eligibility
- official BOBCARD Key Fact Statement (17 Jul 2026) — Empower Business Card at NIL joining and ₹500 annual waived by ₹50,000, and the 3.5% catch-all foreign-currency fee
- official BOBCARD Product Features T&C (15 Jul 2026) — Empower's 1 point per ₹100 core rate, the clause excluding it from accelerated points by name, and its absence from the lounge table