CUB SalarySe Level UP
KeepTwelve lounge visits and 1% abroad for a ₹500 fee that ₹2 lakh of spend erases.
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: None published — neither the KFS nor the reward document carries a welcome or activation benefit.
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 for itself at ₹5,000 a month
At ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹600 gross (earn ₹600) against its ₹500 fee = ₹100 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 #511
Why #511 A 1% foreign fee and twelve domestic lounge visits for ₹500 waived at ₹2 lakh is an unusually good ₹500 card, and now that SalarySe SCoins are marked at the 20 paise CUB itself publishes it is ranked on a real 1% everyday rate rather than carried blind. Ranked on that rate and not on the marketing page's, which is five times larger.
Priced by the programme rather than inferred. CUB's reward document states the exchange outright — "1 Reward Point(RP) shall be equivalent to 1 SCoin, and 5 Scoins shall be equivalent to ₹1" — so an SCoin is 20 paise, flat, with no better redemption to find: they are spendable only inside the SalarySe app, on gift vouchers from 200+ brands, cash conversion or merchant offers, and they expire 18 months from the date they are earned. That is why every rate on this page is a fifth of the number CUB's own marketing prints.
The take
City Union Bank is not where you expect to find this, and that is the point. For ₹500 a year — waived outright above ₹2 lakh of spend — the physical Level UP card charges 1% on foreign transactions, against an Indian norm of 3.5% and against the 2% CUB charges on its own virtual version of the same card. It also carries twelve domestic lounge visits a year on the RuPay programme, earned one at a time: spend ₹10,000 or more in a billing cycle and a pass is credited when that statement generates, valid for thirty days. Miss the ₹10,000 in a month and that month's visit does not arrive, so twelve is the ceiling, not a stock you can draw on before a trip. Now the rewards, and the first thing to do is divide by five. CUB pays this card in SalarySe SCoins and its own reward document sets the exchange at five SCoins to the rupee, while the product page advertises each tier with a percent sign after the SCoin count — so "5% rewards" is a fifth of what it looks like. Do the arithmetic and the card is a 1% everyday card: five SCoins per ₹100 on SalarySe UPI, on online spend with the card and at the terminal, doubling to 2% on whatever you spend past ₹20,000 in a cycle, and reaching 7.5% on the 1st and last day of the month through SalarySe UPI once ₹5,000 of ordinary spend has unlocked it — capped at ₹15,000 of bonus-day spend, so about ₹1,125 a cycle at most. Pay through any other UPI app, or spend on rent, railways, insurance, education, telecom or government, and you drop to a fifth of that. And whatever you earn lives inside the SalarySe app and expires eighteen months from the day you earn it, so treat it as a rebate to spend rather than a balance to bank. Read the fee sheet too: interest is 42% a year, there is a 1% surcharge on rent, wallet loads, fuel above ₹50,000 a cycle, utilities above ₹25,000 and online gaming above ₹10,000, and the ₹500 add-on card is charged even on the lifetime-free variant.
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
₹500/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹500/yr
The waiver ₹2,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹16,667 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.
At your spend
₹3,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹9,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹21,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹69,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,17,600 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
- 1% foreign-currency transaction fee — a quarter of the 3.5% Indian norm, and half what the virtual version of this same card charges
- 12 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year on the RuPay programme, at a curated list CUB publishes in full
- ₹500 a year, waived entirely on ₹2 lakh of spend
- Fuel surcharge waiver of 1% on transactions between ₹400 and ₹3,000, up to ₹300 a statement cycle
- First credit-limit enhancement is free; card re-issue is ₹300 where most issuers charge more
- Interest-free credit of 20 to 48 days depending on where in the cycle the purchase falls
Watch out
- DIVIDE THE MARKETING PAGE BY FIVE. CUB writes each tier as a SCoin count with a percent sign after it, and its own reward document sets five SCoins to the rupee — the "5% / 10% / 37.5% rewards" tiers are worth 1%, 2% and 7.5%
- SCoins redeem only inside the SalarySe app — no bank statement credit, no transfer partner, no airline — and they expire 18 months from the date they are earned
- The lounge visits arrive one a month and only if that cycle's bill tops ₹10,000 — each pass then expires in 30 days, so they cannot be banked for a trip
- 42% a year on revolving credit and on cash alike
- A 1% fee applies to rent, to wallet loads, to fuel above ₹50,000 a cycle, to utilities above ₹25,000 and to online skill-based gaming above ₹10,000
- Cash costs up to 3% or ₹250 at an Indian ATM and up to 3.5% or ₹1,000 abroad, whichever is higher
- Add-on cards are ₹500 plus GST — charged even on the variant CUB calls lifetime free
- Rewards other than the Salary Day bonus are capped at 10% of your credit limit a month
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes SalarySe SCoins 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
2 sourced rules
CUB's own Card Product Feature Document is the only place the SalarySe reward tiers are written down, and it is the document this row rests on. The education and government rows are asserted here; CUB's other base-rate categories are not read on this pass.
- Government / tax · reduced CUB files government services in its Base Rewards tier, the penalty rate rather than the everyday one — 1 point/₹100 vs the 5 points/₹100 the card pays on SalarySe UPI, online and in store. SCoins, in CUB's own name for them, and five of them are ₹1, so a tax payment earns 0.2%. The reward document puts government services in that tier beside railways, rent, education, insurance, telecom, tolls, agriculture, post office and BillPay. No cap is published on the tier
- Education · reduced CUB files education in its Base Rewards tier, the penalty rate rather than the everyday one — 1 point/₹100 vs the 5 points/₹100 the card pays on SalarySe UPI, online and in store. SCoins, in CUB's own name for them, and five of them are ₹1. The reward document puts education in that tier beside railways, rent, government services, insurance, telecom, tolls, agriculture, post office and BillPay. No cap is published on the tier
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
₹2,00,000 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. City Union Bank states what the CUB SalarySe Level UP earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹2,00,000 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
17 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: ₹10,000 or more billed in the previous billing cycle unlocks that cycle's single visit; the pass is credited when that statement generates and lapses in 30 days
Opens 17 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 10 airports , via RuPay — see the full map →
Can you get it?
income, age and the route in
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.
Through SalarySe, on City Union Bank's licence. The card is built around a salary-linked fintech's app, and that is a real condition rather than a detail: the accelerated tiers only pay when the payment runs through SalarySe UPI or the card itself, and SCoins can only be redeemed inside the SalarySe app. Choose the physical card if you want either headline benefit — the 1% foreign fee and the twelve lounge visits are both marked "Applicable on Physical card", and the virtual-only variant is lifetime free but charges 2% abroad and opens no lounge door. CUB publishes no income criterion, no age band and no salary-account requirement for the product.
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
6 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
TWO VARIANTS IN ONE FEE TABLE. The KFS names "CUB SALARY SE LEVEL UP CREDIT CARD( LIFETIME FREE CARD)" at NIL joining and NIL annual, and "CUB SALARY SE LEVEL UP CREDIT CARD( PAID CARD)" at ₹500 + GST and ₹500 + GST "(waived on spends of ₹ 2L)". This row is the PAID card; the free one is carried as cub-salaryse-level-up-virtual. The two ₹500 figures are one recurring fee — the columns read "Joining Fee (Will be levied after card activation)" and "Annual Fee 2nd year onwards" — so no separate joining fee is modelled. Surcharges, all 1%: rent, wallet loads, fuel above ₹50,000 cumulative a cycle, utilities above ₹25,000 and online skill-based gaming above ₹10,000. Fuel surcharge waiver 1% on ₹400–₹3,000, capped ₹300 a cycle. First limit enhancement free, ₹200 thereafter; card re-issue ₹300 on the paid card and NIL on the free one; cheque return ₹300; charge-slip retrieval ₹250; EMI conversion 2% (min ₹200, max ₹1,000); EMI foreclosure 5% of the outstanding. Interest-free credit 20–48 days (MITC). Rewards are SalarySe SCoins at five to the rupee, expiring 18 months from accrual and redeemable only in the SalarySe app, which is why this card carries no modelled earn. Lounge: 12 domestic visits a year on the RuPay programme, one credited per billing cycle whose bill tops ₹10,000, each pass lapsing 30 days after it is credited, physical card 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 — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Key Fact Statement — the two-variant fee table, the 1% and 2% foreign-currency fees, 42% interest, and the surcharge lines on rent, fuel, utilities and gaming
- official CUB's own reward-structure document — the SCoin tiers, the five-SCoins-to-a-rupee exchange rate, the 18-month expiry and the RuPay lounge rule
- official The card's product page — the twelve lounge visits, the 1% foreign rate on the physical card and 2% on the virtual, and the reward tiers as CUB advertises them
- official The lounge list CUB publishes for this card — the curated domestic rooms the twelve visits open
- official Most Important Terms & Conditions — the interest-free window and the shared-limit rule across cards