Reliance Gold Credit Card
CancelFree for life, sign-up vouchers, and Citi's top rate for letting the Reliance bill auto-debit.
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 #891
Why #891 The senior half of Citi's Reliance pair, and the only card in the range with a standing- instruction accelerator — Citi paid its top rate for letting the phone bill auto-debit. Carried because that mechanism has all but vanished from Indian cards and is worth the record.
The take
Reliance and Citi built a pair of co-brands and this is the senior one. The interesting design choice sits in the accrual table rather than in the fee: the top tier was reserved not for a category but for a MECHANISM — spends made through a standing instruction set up to pay a Reliance post-paid mobile bill. Citi paid its best rate for the auto-debit and its base rate for every other standing instruction, which is a bank telling you exactly which behaviour it wanted. Below that sat Adlabs, the cinema chain Reliance then owned, and select products and services at Reliance World and Reliance Communications outlets. Everything else earned the base. The card cost nothing for life, took up to five add-ons also free for life, waived the IndianOil fuel surcharge like the rest of the range, and shipped with sign-up vouchers worth ₹400 in total, split between Reliance World broadband and gaming and a popcorn credit at Adlabs. The whole proposition dies with the ecosystem: Adlabs is long gone, Reliance World is long gone, and so is the card. As a travel card it was always a blank.
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 up to five add-on cards also free for life
- Citi's top rate on this card went to spends made by standing instruction against a Reliance post-paid mobile bill — a mechanism, not a category
- Sign-up vouchers worth ₹400 in total: ₹200 for Reliance World broadband and gaming, ₹200 for a popcorn credit at Adlabs
- 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
- EVERY ACCELERATOR WAS TIED TO A DEAD ECOSYSTEM: Adlabs, Reliance World and Reliance Communications outlets are all gone, so the tiers above the base rate were unspendable long before the card was withdrawn
- The Reliance Silver carries an IDENTICAL accrual table — the two differ only in the sign-up voucher value, and this desk files both because Citi sold both
- No lounge access, no co-brand airline, no travel accelerator, no forex concession and no conversion out
- The 2.33% top rung was a Reliance POST-PAID bill on standing instruction and nothing else — Citi's own table drops every other standing instruction to the 0.47% base
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 →
What earns, what doesn't
1 sourced rule
Citi's own product page, read from the archive — "5 Rewards Points | For every Rs. 150 spent through standing instruction facility availed for paying Reliance mobile bills (post-paid)" against "1 Rewards Point | For every Rs. 150 spent on all other spends including other standing instructions". The card is closed and the live host is gone; only the telecom row is asserted here, as a record of what the co-brand paid, not a live rate.
- Telecom · accelerated 5 Rewards Points per ₹150 (2.33%) on a Reliance post-paid mobile bill paid by standing instruction — Citi's own accrual table — against the 1 Rewards Point per ₹150 (0.47%) every other phone bill and every other standing instruction earns; no cap was published. Archived 2012 terms for a closed card, not a live rate
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 Reliance Gold Credit Card product page (archived 23-Nov-2012) — "This Card comes to you Free for Life", the four-tier accrual table and the ₹400 sign-up vouchers
- 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