DCB PayLess Select Credit Card
Keep₹1,000 a year, ₹1.5 lakh in an FD, and nine lounge visits including one abroad — the cheapest international lounge door in India.
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
Read the ₹0.4L figure carefully: ₹4,000 of its ₹4,000 gross is a voucher or a hotel night, not points — worth that only if you would have bought it anyway.
Welcome: None published — DCB carries no welcome benefit for the PayLess range.
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 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 →
Breaks even only by erasing its fee at ₹18,000 a month
At ₹18,000 a month — ₹2,16,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹0 gross against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹1,000 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹2,00,000 a year = ₹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 #408
Why #408 The only DCB card with an international lounge visit, and the only secured card in India that hands a first-time borrower nine lounge entries a year for ₹1,000. It earns almost nothing per swipe — the whole return is one ₹1,000 cheque a quarter — so it ranks on the door it opens, not on the points it pays.
PayLess Select pays no points. The entire reward is ₹1,000 of statement cashback for a quarter in which you spend ₹1,00,000 on eligible categories — 1.0% at exactly the threshold, and a smaller and smaller percentage every rupee above it, because the ₹1,000 does not scale. Rent, wallet loads, fuel, gaming, gambling and cash do not count.
The take
The PayLess Select is a secured card that behaves like a mid-tier travel card, and that combination is close to unique. Park ₹1,50,000 in a DCB fixed deposit — which keeps earning its own interest — and DCB issues a RuPay card with nine complimentary lounge visits a year: two domestic a quarter plus one international a year. No other FD-backed card in India publishes an international lounge entitlement at all. The fee is ₹1,000, nothing to get the card, and it waives entirely if you spent ₹2,00,000 in the previous calendar year. What it does not do is pay you to spend. There is no reward rate: DCB's own rewards FAQ is a single row saying ₹1,000 cashback for a quarter in which you spend ₹1,00,000 — 1.0% if you land exactly on the number and less every rupee after, with rent, wallet loads, fuel, gaming and cash all struck out of the count. Foreign spend carries the full 3.5% markup, so the lounge is the travel benefit and the card is not. Buy it for the door. A first-time borrower, a homemaker or anyone rebuilding a file gets premium-card airport access, a ₹10 lakh accident cover and a RuPay concierge line for ₹1,000 a year and a deposit they keep. Put the actual spending on something that earns.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card reaches break-even by ERASING its fee, not by out-earning it: the waiver is the decision.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹1,000/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 joining, then ₹1,000/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 ₹18,000 a month — ₹2,16,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee, and it gets there by erasing the fee at the waiver rather than out-earning it.
At your spend
₹0 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹4,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹4,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹4,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹4,000 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
DCB 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
- Nine complimentary lounge visits a year — 2 domestic per quarter plus 1 international per year, the only international entitlement on any DCB card
- Nil joining fee; ₹1,000 a year from the 13th month, waived on ₹2,00,000 of previous-calendar-year spend
- ₹1,000 cashback for any quarter in which you spend ₹1,00,000 on eligible categories
- FD-secured with no income proof and no credit history — the deposit keeps earning DCB's FD rate
- Credit limit is 90% of the linked deposit, up to ₹9,00,000; link more FDs in the app to raise it instantly
- ₹10,00,000 RuPay personal accident cover, plus a complimentary RuPay concierge line
- 1% fuel-surcharge waiver up to ₹100 a statement cycle on fuel transactions up to ₹5,000
Watch out
- NO per-swipe reward of any kind — the entire return is one ₹1,000 cashback per qualifying quarter, and it does not scale above ₹1,00,000
- Rent, wallet loads, online gaming, gambling, fuel and cash withdrawals are excluded from the milestone count by MCC
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup — this is a lounge card, not a card to spend abroad on
- The ₹1,50,000 minimum fixed deposit is nearly ten times the Platinum variant's ₹15,000 door
- 36% a year (3% a month) on revolving credit; ₹500 late fee above ₹1,000 outstanding
- ₹250 to close the card within a year; ₹250 to reissue or replace it
- ATM cash costs 2.5% or ₹250, whichever is higher, and interest runs from the day of withdrawal
- Tax Saver, minor, joint, HUF, NRI, trust and partnership fixed deposits are all ineligible as collateral
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Statement cashback (₹) 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
8 sourced rules · 3 pay zero
The same single list as the Platinum variant, doing the same double duty: with no per-swipe reward on the card, an excluded category earns nothing and a counted one earns its share of the ₹1,000 paid for a quarter in which ₹1,00,000 is spent. DCB's wording, verbatim: "Transactions made for rent payment, wallet loading, online gaming, gambling, fuel, cash withdrawal will not be considered (MCC- 6010, 6011, 6012, 6051, 6513, 6540, 7800, 7801, 7995, 8651, 5541, 5542, 5172)."
- Rent & property management · excluded Named in the exclusion prose and by MCC 6513
- Wallet loads · excluded "Wallet loading" in the prose, MCC 6540 in the list
- Fuel · excluded Excluded from the reward count by MCC 5541, 5542 and 5172 — the same three the 1% fuel-surcharge waiver runs on, capped at ₹100 a statement cycle for transactions up to ₹5,000
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 ₹1,000 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. DCB Bank states what the DCB PayLess Select Credit Card 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
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.
No income proof, no credit history and no branch visit. Open the DCB Mobile Banking app, tap the Credit Card tile, pick or create a DCB fixed deposit of at least ₹1,50,000, choose the Select variant, confirm the embossing name, nominee and delivery address, and the card arrives in five to seven working days. Applicants must be 18–75, resident in India, with full KYC and no non-performing loan at the time of applying; the deposit must be single-name, at least a year long, and free of lien or freeze. The credit limit is 90% of the linked deposit and rises instantly when you link another one, to a ceiling of ₹9,00,000.
per the official DCB 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
4 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
FEE COLUMNS: TWO, labelled "Joining Fee" and "Annual Fee", NOT inverted. Joining Nil, annual ₹1,000 from the 13th month, waived on ₹2,00,000 of previous-calendar-year spend; the "( ₹0 as part of limited offer )" beside it is a live promotion, not the standing fee. NO MITC OR KFS PDF IS PUBLISHED for the PayLess range — the product page's tables are the primary document. Secured on a DCB fixed deposit from ₹1,50,000, ten times the Platinum variant's door (single-name, minimum 365 days; Tax Saver, minor and joint deposits ineligible); credit limit 90% of the deposit to a ₹9,00,000 ceiling. REWARDS ARE A QUARTERLY MILESTONE AND NOTHING ELSE: ₹1,000 cashback for a quarter in which ₹1,00,000 is spent, credited in the first month of the next quarter, with rent, wallet loading, online gaming, gambling, fuel and cash withdrawal excluded (same MCC list as the Platinum). No per-swipe rate exists. DO NOT CONFLATE the ₹1,00,000 quarterly milestone with the ₹2,00,000 annual waiver threshold — they are different numbers for different things. LOUNGE IS THE REASON TO HOLD IT: 2 domestic visits per quarter plus 1 international per year, 9 a year in total, on NPCI's RuPay list — the only international lounge entitlement on any DCB card. 1% fuel-surcharge waiver up to ₹100 a statement cycle on fuel up to ₹5,000. ₹10,00,000 RuPay personal accident cover (against ₹2,00,000 on the Platinum) and a RuPay concierge line. Reissue and replacement ₹250 each; closure ₹250 within a year.
per the official DCB 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 DCB Bank'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 Product page and FAQs — nine lounge visits a year (2 domestic a quarter, 1 international a year), Nil joining, ₹1,000 annual waived at ₹2,00,000, and ₹1,000 cashback on ₹1,00,000 of quarterly spend
- official DCB's cards hub — the PayLess Select is listed and open for application, filed under Secured Credit Card