Delhi Metro Citibank
CancelA metro card on the chip, a credit card on the stripe. India's first transit co-brand.
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: No sign-up bonus was published — what you got instead was the ₹50 security deposit DMRC charged on its own Travel Card, waived, and up to five lifetime-free add-on cards
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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #870
Why #870 The first Indian transit co-brand, and still the most literal one: a single piece of plastic that was a DMRC travel card on the chip and a Citibank credit card on the stripe. Carried because the two live metro cards on this board — SBI's and ICICI's Unifare — are descendants of an idea Citi and Delhi Metro shipped in 2008.
The take
This is where the Indian transit co-brand starts. In 2008 Citibank and Delhi Metro Rail issued one piece of plastic that was two products at once — a contactless DMRC travel card on the embedded chip, and an ordinary Citibank credit card on the magnetic stripe — so a commuter tapped through the gate and paid for lunch with the same card, which nobody in India had done before. The mechanics were sensible in a way later transit cards were not: loading value onto the metro chip earned reward points at twice the rate ordinary card spend did, the points came back out as free metro rides, every fare taken on the card carried a ten per cent discount, and DMRC's ₹50 security deposit on its standalone Travel Card was waived because the credit line stood behind it. Around that sat "Delhi Delights", a period-perfect bundle of local offers — Domino's, Fun Cinemas, VLCC, Nirula's, Bercos, Teksons, the Metro Now tabloid — plus up to five lifetime-free add-on cards and a full waiver of the fuel surcharge at IndianOil. It cost nothing at all. It is long gone: Citi's page for it no longer resolves and the bank's Indian consumer card book was sold to Axis in 2023, by which time DMRC had moved to its own smart card and then to the NCMC standard. The rate it paid was one Reward Point per ₹100 anywhere and two per ₹100 loaded onto the metro chip — 0.7% and 1.4% at what a Citi Reward Point is worth today, which is 70 paise by Axis's own migration arithmetic.
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
₹2,100 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹4,200 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹8,400 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹25,200 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹42,000 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
Citibank 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
- One card, two products: a DMRC travel chip and a Citibank credit card on the same plastic
- A 10% discount on every Delhi Metro fare paid with it, and DMRC's ₹50 travel-card security deposit waived
- Reward points redeemable directly for free Metro rides, earned at double rate on value loaded to the metro chip
- Free for life, with up to five lifetime-free add-on cards for family over 18
- Full waiver of the 2.5% fuel surcharge at IndianOil outlets
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — Citibank's page for this card no longer resolves and its Indian consumer book was sold to Axis Bank in 2023
- The 70-paise point is DERIVED, not published: Citi never priced this unit, so the value comes from Axis's migration ratio of 1 Reward Point to 1.75 EDGE REWARD Points and its promise that the monetary value did not change
- "Redeem your Reward Points for free Metro rides" was the advertised exit and DMRC never published a points-per-ride table — that channel could beat 70 paise or miss it, and nothing here assumes either
- The metro chip was DMRC's own generation of stored-value technology, long since replaced by the smart card and then NCMC
- The primary cardholder had to be over 25 — an unusual floor, and a high one for a commuter card
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Citibank 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 →
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. Citibank's product page for the card no longer resolves and its Indian consumer card book was sold to Axis Bank; Delhi Metro's own fare media have been replaced twice since.
Citibank 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
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.
- 15 Jul 2024Citibank India credit cards fully migrate to AxisCiti-branded cards and systems → Axis Bank platform
The Citi era in India formally ends: card numbers and limits stayed put, but statements, apps and rewards now run on Axis. The prized Citi rewards ecosystem effectively closed, pushing its loyalists into the Axis stack.
- 30 Mar 2022Axis Bank agrees to buy Citi India's consumer banking armCiti India winding down with no confirmed buyer → Axis to acquire Citi cards, retail bank for ₹12,325 cr
Axis Bank signed to take over Citi's ~2.5 million Indian credit cards, retail banking and wealth business for ₹12,325 crore — the biggest shake-up of India's premium card landscape since the RBI bans. Every Citi Prestige and PremierMiles holder now knew exactly whose EDGE Rewards ecosystem they'd eventually land in.
- 15 Apr 2021Citi announces exit from Indian consumer banking
- 12 Oct 2019Citi India guts reward earning on utilities, insurance, and tax
- 1 Dec 2017Citi PremierMiles' 10X 'Extra' partner program dies for good
- 1 Apr 2016IndusInd JetPrivilege card kills weekend miles bonanza
- 1 Apr 2016Citi Prestige strips Etihad Guest Gold and partner perks
- 1 Feb 2015Citi PremierMiles doubles the cost of transferring to airline partners
Every Citibank change we've dated → 7 events since 2012, 4 of them nerfs — worst year 2019.
Verified against Citibank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point