MTV Citibank Credit Card
CancelCiti's youth card: free for life, free entry to discotheques, and points that bought MTV T-shirts.
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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #889
Why #889 India's youth co-brand before youth co-brands were a category — a free-for-life card whose points bought MTV merchandise and whose benefit sheet was a nightlife pass. Carried because nothing on this board today occupies the slot it invented.
The take
This is a period piece and it is a genuinely interesting one. Citi India built a co-brand around MTV at a moment when almost no Indian issuer was targeting people under twenty-five, and the benefit sheet is unlike anything on the board today: free and exclusive entry to discotheques, cut rates at pool parlours, bowling alleys and entertainment arcades, and offers on new CD and book releases in your city. The card cost nothing for life and carried one add-on, also free for life. The catch is the exit. Points earned here bought MTV Style clothing and accessories and nothing else — no cash, no statement credit, no airline, no hotel, no general catalogue — so the accrual was only worth what the merchandise was worth to you, and the rate was middling by Citi's own ladder anyway. As a travel card it is a blank. What it deserves credit for is the shape of the idea: a free card sold on experiences rather than on a rate. That idea is everywhere in 2026 and it started here. Long withdrawn.
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
₹1,400 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹2,800 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,600 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹16,800 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹28,000 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
- Free for life in Citi's own printed words, with one additional card also free for life
- Free and exclusive entry to discotheques, and cut rates at pool parlours, bowling alleys and entertainment arcades
- Offers on new CD and book releases in the holder's own city
- Fuel-surcharge waiver at IndianOil outlets, taking Citi's stated 2.5% surcharge to zero
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — gone from Citi India's range before the Axis Bank handover, and not one of the nine products on Axis's Forward Together site
- THE POINTS HAD ONE EXIT: MTV Style clothing and accessories. No cash, no statement credit, no airline, no hotel and no general catalogue
- No lounge access, no travel accelerator, no forex concession and no airline conversion
- The 0.47% is the generic Citi Reward Point's value, but this card's points went into MTV MERCHANDISE and nothing else — Citi never priced that catalogue in rupees, so the narrowness is a real risk the rate cannot show
- The nightlife benefits were tied to venues Citi and MTV signed, and neither published a list that survives
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. The card was withdrawn from Citi India's range before the bank sold its Indian consumer business to Axis Bank, and citibank.co.in no longer resolves. It has no successor on Axis's Forward Together migration site.
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
Every document behind this page — 2 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Citibank India's own MTV Credit Card product page (archived 27-Oct-2007) — "This Card comes to you Free for Life", the reward rate, and the merchandise-only redemption
- official "Forward Together", Axis Bank's Citi-transition site — the closed nine-product set Citi India still had at the handover, which does not include this card