CUB SalarySe Level UP Virtual
KeepFree forever, 2% abroad, and no plastic — the digital-first half of CUB's SalarySe pair.
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 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 #512
Why #512 A 2% foreign fee on a card that is free forever is a real thing to hold, and it is the reason this variant is admitted. Now that SalarySe SCoins are marked at the 20 paise CUB itself publishes, the 1% everyday rate underneath is ranked too — and it is a fifth of the number the product page prints.
Priced by the programme rather than inferred: CUB's reward document states "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. SCoins are spendable only inside the SalarySe app — gift vouchers from 200+ brands, cash conversion or merchant offers — and they expire 18 months from the date they are earned. Every rate on this page is therefore a fifth of the number CUB's own marketing prints.
The take
This is the same card as CUB SalarySe Level UP with the plastic taken away, and CUB prices the difference in both directions. You pay nothing ever — the KFS's own row calls it the LIFETIME FREE CARD and prints NIL against joining and annual alike — and in exchange the foreign fee doubles, the lounge access disappears entirely, and the Salary Day bonus tier drops. Two per cent is still well under the 3.5% every large Indian issuer charges, which on a card with no fee at all is a genuinely useful thing to carry for a trip abroad. On the rewards, divide by five before you get excited. CUB pays this in SalarySe SCoins and its own reward document sets five of them to the rupee, while the product page advertises each tier with a percent sign after the SCoin count — so the card is really a 1% everyday card, rising to 2% on whatever you spend past ₹20,000 in a cycle and to 5% on the 1st and last day of the month through SalarySe UPI, once ₹5,000 of ordinary spend has unlocked it and capped at ₹15,000 of bonus-day spend, which is about ₹750 a cycle. Pay through another UPI app, or on rent, railways, insurance, education, telecom or government, and it drops to a fifth of that. The coins expire eighteen months after they are earned and can only be spent inside the SalarySe app, so treat them as a rebate rather than a balance. Note also that "free" stops at the primary card: an add-on costs ₹500 plus GST here exactly as it does on the paid variant. If you want the lounge access or the 1% foreign rate, the physical card is ₹500 a year and waived at ₹2 lakh of spend, which is the version worth having.
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
₹3,600 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹9,600 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹21,600 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹69,600 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,17,600 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
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
- Lifetime free — CUB's KFS names the variant "LIFETIME FREE CARD" and prints NIL against both the joining and the annual line
- 2% foreign-currency transaction fee, well under the 3.5% Indian norm
- Card re-issue and replacement are NIL on this variant, where the paid card is charged ₹300
- Virtual-only and digital-first — CUB's page calls it "a virtual-only lifetime-free credit card for customers who prefer a digital-first experience"
- Fuel surcharge waiver of 1% on transactions between ₹400 and ₹3,000, up to ₹300 a statement cycle
Watch out
- NO LOUNGE ACCESS AT ALL — CUB marks the benefit "Applicable on Physical card" on its own page, and the lounge list PDF is named for the physical variant
- The foreign fee is double the physical card's: 2% here, 1% there
- 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
- 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 Salary Day bonus is lower on this variant than on the physical one — CUB splits the tier explicitly, 25 SCoins per ₹100 here against 37.5 there, so 5% against 7.5%
- Add-on cards cost ₹500 plus GST even though the primary card is lifetime free
- 42% a year on revolving credit and on cash alike, with a 1% fee on rent, wallet loads, fuel above ₹50,000 a cycle, utilities above ₹25,000 and online gaming above ₹10,000
- CUB names no card network for this variant anywhere, so we print none
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
The virtual-only edition differs from the physical card on the Salary Day bonus and the foreign-currency rate and on nothing else, so its base and accelerated tiers — and therefore this row — are the physical card's. The education and government rows are asserted here.
- 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 and on online card spend. 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 and on online card spend. 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 →
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?
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, and it arrives as a virtual credential rather than plastic. 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, so the product only makes sense to someone who will use that app. CUB publishes no income criterion, no age band and no salary-account requirement. If you want the lounge visits or the 1% foreign rate, ask for the physical card instead — it is a separate row in CUB's own fee table at ₹500 a year, waived above ₹2 lakh of spend.
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.
THE LIFETIME-FREE ROW of a two-variant fee table. CUB's KFS prints "CUB SALARY SE LEVEL UP CREDIT CARD( LIFETIME FREE CARD) — NIL | NIL | ₹ 500 + GST", the third column being the add-on fee, which is not nil. The paid sibling is carried as cub-salaryse-level-up. Two reader-facing charges differ between the columns and both favour the paid card: foreign currency 2% here against 1% there, and card re-issue / replacement NIL here against ₹300 there. Everything else is shared with the paid row — 42% a year, the 1% surcharges on rent, wallet loads, fuel above ₹50,000 a cycle, utilities above ₹25,000 and online skill-based gaming above ₹10,000, the ₹400–₹3,000 fuel surcharge waiver capped at ₹300 a cycle, EMI conversion 2% (min ₹200, max ₹1,000) and EMI foreclosure 5%. NO LOUNGE ACCESS: CUB marks the benefit "Applicable on Physical card" and names its lounge list PDF for the physical variant. Rewards are SalarySe SCoins at five to the rupee, expiring 18 months from accrual and redeemable only in the SalarySe app, so no earn is modelled; note the Salary Day tier is lower on this variant (25 SCoins per ₹100 against 37.5 on physical+virtual). Interest-free credit 20–48 days, and the MITC warns the credit and cash limits are shared across a holder's cards.
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 Key Fact Statement — the LIFETIME FREE row at NIL joining and NIL annual, the 2% foreign-currency fee, 42% interest and the nil card-replacement charge
- official CUB's reward-structure document — the SCoin exchange rate, the 18-month expiry, and the lower Salary Day tier this variant earns
- official The card's product page — the virtual-only lifetime-free description, and the two foreign rates split by variant
- official Most Important Terms & Conditions — the interest-free window and the limit shared across a holder's cards