CUB CSK Master World
KeepZero forex markup on a Chennai Super Kings card — CUB charges 3.5% on the other five.
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: Not published — neither CUB's Key Fact Statement nor its CSK/SRH reward document states any welcome, activation or first-transaction bonus
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied: it earns nothing on utilities and fuel here, so that spend is dropped, not paid at the headline, and stops pacing milestones and the waiver. 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 for itself at ₹40,000 a month
At ₹40,000 a month — ₹4,80,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹4,000 gross (earn ₹4,000) against its ₹4,000 fee = ₹0 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.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #424
Why #424 A cricket co-brand from a Kumbakonam bank is not where you expect to find a zero-forex card, and that is the whole case for this one: CUB's KFS charges 3.5% foreign-currency markup on five of its six CSK/SRH variants and 0% on this one. Add a 2X accelerator on travel, flights and hotels at a point worth a full rupee, and it earns its place. It ranks here and not higher because the points are terminal — vouchers and merchandise, no airline, no hotel — and because CUB publishes no lounge access at all.
CUB prices its Reward Point per VARIANT, and the World tier sits at the top of its own table: ₹1.00 per RP, against ₹0.75 on Master Platinum and ₹0.50 on RuPay Platinum. That is the house value exactly, so nothing is haircut here — unusually, the headline count IS the effective count. Redemption is vouchers and merchandise at rewards.cub.bank.in; there is no transfer partner and no statement credit.
The take
Read CUB's Key Fact Statement one row at a time and this card gives itself away. The foreign-currency line reads "3.5% of the transaction amount", then adds, in parentheses, "0% of the transaction amount for (CSK/SRH Master World Variant)". One of six variants is exempt, and it is this one. Zero forex from a ₹4,000 Mastercard World is already unusual; zero forex that still pays 1 RP per ₹100 on international spends — the reward document states the domestic and international rates as identical, which most zero-forex cards do not — is the part worth the fee. The rest holds up. The 2X list is "Travel, Flight Bookings, and Hotel Bookings", so the accelerator sits exactly where a travel reader spends, and CUB's own illustration works it out: ₹10,000 of travel earns 200 RP. The point is worth a full rupee here, top of CUB's three-rung variant table, so 2X really is 2%. Year one costs nothing — the KFS prints joining as NIL and the ₹4,000 starts in year two, waived if you spend ₹5 lakh. Now the limits, and they are real. The points are terminal: they redeem for vouchers and merchandise at CUB's portal and reach no airline and no hotel programme, so this is a spending card, not a miles engine. CUB publishes NO lounge access — not in the KFS, not in the reward document, not anywhere we could find — and a Mastercard World badge is not a quota, so we tag none. The exclusion list is long and includes fuel, rent, utilities, insurance, education, wallet loads and government payments, which is most of what people push through a card to hit a spend target. And the ₹5 lakh waiver bar is high for a card whose everyday rate is 1%. Buy it to spend abroad and to book travel; do not buy it to collect miles.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
Here is the fee, the spend that clears it, and everything that has moved under this card since you last decided.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹4,000/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 joining, then ₹4,000/yr
The waiver ₹5,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹41,667 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹40,000 a month — ₹4,80,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
−₹1,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹10,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹30,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹50,400 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
City Union 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
- 0% foreign-currency markup — the KFS exempts the Master World variant alone from CUB's 3.5%
- 1 RP per ₹100 on international spends, the same rate as domestic — the zero markup is not paid for with a dead earn rate
- 2X Reward Points on travel, flight bookings and hotel bookings, worth 2.0% at CUB's ₹1 World redemption rate
- ₹1.00 per Reward Point, the top rung of CUB's three-variant table (₹0.75 Master Platinum, ₹0.50 RuPay Platinum)
- Nil joining fee: the ₹4,000 starts in year two and is waived on ₹5 lakh of annual spend
- 3X on CSK merchandise and match tickets — 3.0%, the card's best rate
- A virtual RuPay card on the same account makes it UPI-linkable at 2 RP per ₹150
Watch out
- No lounge access is published anywhere — CUB's Key Fact Statement and reward document are both silent, and a Mastercard World tier is a badge, not a quota
- The points are terminal: vouchers and merchandise at rewards.cub.bank.in, with no airline or hotel transfer partner published
- A long exclusion list earns nothing at all — fuel, rent, utilities and telecom, insurance, education, wallet loads, gold and jewellery, gambling, government payments and cash
- The ₹4,000 renewal is waived only at ₹5 lakh of annual spend, a high bar against a 1% everyday rate
- Surcharges stack on top of the exclusions: 1% on rent, 1% on wallet loads, and 1% on fuel, utility or skill-gaming spend once the cycle crosses ₹50,000 / ₹25,000 / ₹10,000 respectively
- Revolves at 3.5% a month — 42% a year — on both purchases and cash advances, at the steep end of the Indian market
- Reward Points round DOWN to whole numbers on every transaction, so small spends leak: CUB's own example turns 1.96 RP into 1
- CUB reserves the right to modify or withdraw the reward programme, and says points 'may expire as per the Bank's policy' without publishing that policy
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes City Union Bank 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
11 sourced rules · 9 pay zero
CUB publishes its exclusions as a four-digit MCC table (§5, "Transactions Not Eligible for Rewards") rather than as prose, which makes this one of the cleaner rows on the file — but the table is unusually WIDE, and several of its ranges are far broader than the label above them suggests. "Insurance 5960–6399" sweeps in the whole 6000-block of financial institutions; "Government Payments 9000–9999" covers every government MCC there is; "Utilities & Telecom 4800–4999" swallows 4900 utilities and 4814 telecom but ALSO 4899 cable and 4816 computer network services. Read as written, roughly a fifth of the four-digit space earns nothing. What is NOT on the table, and therefore earns the full 1 RP per ₹100: airlines (4511), hotels (7011), travel agencies (4722), groceries, dining, apparel and ordinary e-commerce — so the 2X travel accelerator lands on categories the exclusion list leaves alone, which is the point of the card. §6 adds two rules that bite quietly: "Each transaction qualifies for only one reward category", so the 2X and 3X tiers never stack, and points "are calculated in whole numbers only; any fractional value will be rounded down". Several excluded categories ALSO carry a 1% surcharge under the KFS — fuel, rent, wallet loads and utilities are charged for as well as unrewarded.
- Fuel · excluded MCCs 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983 earn no Reward Points. On top of that the KFS levies a 1% fuel transaction fee once cumulative fuel spend crosses ₹50,000 in a statement cycle, and the 1% fuel surcharge waiver applies only to transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000, capped at ₹500 of benefit per cycle
- Rent & property management · excluded MCC 6513 earns nothing, and the KFS adds a 1% rental surcharge on EVERY rent transaction — CUB works the example at ₹200 plus taxes on a ₹20,000 rent payment
- Wallet loads · excluded MCCs 6538–6542 earn nothing, and the KFS charges a 1% wallet load transaction fee on each such transaction (it names 6538, 6539, 6540, 6541 and 6542 individually)
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · excluded CUB excludes the whole 4800–4999 range under "Utilities & Telecom", which covers 4900 utilities, 4899 cable and 4816 computer network services alike. A 1% utility transaction fee also applies above ₹25,000 of cumulative utility spend in a cycle (MCCs 4814, 4899 and 4900)
per City Union Bank T&C · rank every card by spend category →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹5,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹4,000 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. City Union Bank states what the CUB CSK Master World earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹5,00,000 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.
A City Union Bank co-brand with the Chennai Super Kings, applied for through CUB's own credit-card funnel — CUB issues on its own licence, so this is not a partner-bank product and there is no invitation list. CUB publishes no income or age criteria for the variant in its Key Fact Statement, and the eligibility panel on its product page is served by script rather than in the page source, so we do not state a threshold we have not read. The identical SRH variant is the same card with a Sunrisers Hyderabad face.
City Union Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
per the official City Union Bank MITC — figures marked (community) aren't in the PDF; the issuer won't say · filter the board by what you can get →
The fine print
7 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
FIRST YEAR FREE, AND THE COLUMNS SAY SO THEMSELVES. KFS v5 (13 April 2026) heads its fee table "Joining Fee (INR) (Will be levied after card activation)" and "Annual Fee 2nd year onwards (INR)", and the row "CUB CSK MASTER WORLD CREDIT CARD (FIRST YEAR FREE)" reads NIL / "₹ 4000 + GST (waived on spends of ₹ 5L)". Both the column label and the variant's own name encode the same split, so the card carries `joiningFee: 0` beside `annualFee: 4000`. THE FOREX ROW IS THE REASON THIS CARD IS ON THE BOARD: five of the six CSK/SRH variants pay 3.5%, this one pays 0%. Fuel surcharge waiver is 1% on fuel purchases across India, valid only on transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000, capped at a maximum benefit of ₹500 per statement cycle — the KFS assigns that band to "CSK/SRH Master Platinum & CSK/SRH Master World" variants and the lower ₹400–₹3,000 / ₹300 band to the RuPay Platinum pair. Four separate 1% surcharges sit outside the waiver: rent (MCC 6513) on every transaction, wallet loads (6538–6542) on every transaction, fuel once cumulative fuel spend crosses ₹50,000 in a cycle, utilities (4814/4899/4900) above ₹25,000 and online skill-based gaming (5816) above ₹10,000. Other charges: limit enhancement ₹200 per occasion, cheque return ₹300, card re-issue or replacement ₹300, statement retrieval ₹50 beyond three months, charge slip ₹250, ATM balance enquiry nil at CUB and ₹50 elsewhere, keychain FOB ₹400, a physical RuPay card for Master Platinum and Master World holders ₹250, EMI conversion 2% (minimum ₹200, maximum ₹1,000) and EMI foreclosure 5% of the outstanding. Grace period runs 20 to 48 days and is suspended if the previous bill is unpaid. The card cannot be used in Nepal or Bhutan for foreign-currency withdrawal. NO LOUNGE CLAUSE APPEARS ANYWHERE IN THE DOCUMENT, and neither does any insurance, golf, concierge, welcome or milestone benefit — the KFS is fees only, and the separate reward document covers rewards only.
per the official City Union Bank MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
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 City Union Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official CUB's credit-cards page — the live shelf that names the CSK and SRH co-brands and links every document this card is priced from
- official CUB's Key Fact Statement (KFS v5, 13 April 2026) — the fee table for all six CSK/SRH variants, and the row exempting Master World from the 3.5% foreign-currency markup
- official CUB's CSK/SRH Card Product Reward Document — the per-variant earn table, the ₹1.00 World redemption rate and the MCC exclusion list
- official CUB's Chennai Super Kings co-brand product page