HDFC Bank Health Plus International
KeepIndia's first credit card with a mediclaim policy baked into it.
no published earn rate to price
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. Everything we can source — the fee, the charges, the migration that put this card in your hand — is above and stands on its own; this card is simply not on the board, not in the calculator, and cannot win a best-of call until HDFC Bank publishes terms we can cite.
Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #928
Why #928 India's first credit card with a free inbuilt cashless mediclaim, and the only card on HDFC's 2000s shelf whose fee table survives in full. Carried, not priced: the point COUNT is published and the point's VALUE never was, because it redeemed into householder's insurance and a gift catalogue rather than anything with a rupee on it.
The take
HDFC pitched this one with "a swipe a day keeps doctor away", which tells you the year without anyone having to look it up, and then did something nobody in India had done: it put a real insurance policy inside a credit card at no extra charge. Fifty thousand rupees of cashless mediclaim underwritten by National Insurance Company, plus ₹1.5 lakh of critical illness cover spanning open-heart surgery and CABG, cancer, kidney failure and vascular stroke, settled through Family Health Plan Limited as third-party administrator so the cardholder never fronted the hospital bill. You could extend the whole cover to add-on cardholders — spouse, children, siblings — and buy more mediclaim on top at better than half price with a Section 80D deduction attached. For ₹950 a year in 2003 that was an extraordinary trade, and it is the reason this card is remembered at all. The travel side was thinner but real for its era: a tie-up with SITA Travels giving 3.5% off domestic air tickets and 5.5% off international, home delivery of train tickets, and ₹10 lakh of air-accident cover against ₹2 lakh for rail and road. The oddity worth knowing is the loyalty pricing, which ran backwards from every card since: hold the card a year and the revolving rate DROPPED, from 2.65% a month to 2.45%. The other oddity is the age surcharge — ₹400 extra a year if the primary cardholder was over 55, on a health card, which is either actuarially honest or exactly the wrong way round depending on how you feel about it. What cannot be stated is what a point was worth. The accrual is published and precise; the exit was householder's insurance or a gift catalogue, and HDFC never printed a rupee against either. So this card is carried with its fee, its cover and its discounts, and no effective rate.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
There is no renewal arithmetic to run on this card yet — and a break-even we cannot source is not one we will print.
the whole desk — what changed, the downgrade, and what we cannot price →
Keep, downgrade or cancel
what we can and cannot price
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. A break-even is the spend at which value crosses a fee, and we are short one side of that sentence — so this desk prints no ladder, no crossing and no ₹0 standing in for either. What we can source about this card is under Sources.
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
HDFC 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 we cannot price either side of it.
What has changed under this card
- 1 Sep 2026 SmartBuy moves Amazon Pay gift cards to 1X under Insta Deals issuer-wide
- 1 Jul 2026 HDFC caps SmartBuy brand-voucher rewards issuer-wide
- 15 May 2026 HDFC lifts its DCC markup to 1.75% across the card range issuer-wide
We price what is in force today — a change that has not happened yet is not in these numbers. the full archive for this card →
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 inbuilt cashless mediclaim of ₹50,000 plus ₹1.5 lakh of critical-illness cover
- Critical illness covered open-heart surgery and CABG, cancer, kidney failure and vascular stroke
- The mediclaim and critical-illness cover extended to add-on cardholders at no extra charge
- 3.5% off domestic and 5.5% off international air tickets through SITA Travels, with free home delivery
- ₹10 lakh air accident cover; ₹2 lakh for rail and road
- Discounted health check-ups and investigations at participating hospitals in Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai
- The revolving rate FELL on renewal — 2.65% a month in year one, 2.45% thereafter
Watch out
- Long withdrawn — HDFC's own 2011 sitemap still listed it and no HDFC document has priced or described it since
- A ₹400 age surcharge applied on top of the ₹950 fee if the primary cardholder was over 55 — on a health card
- No fee-waiver threshold was ever published: the fee table has no minimum-spend column at all
- The point COUNT is published and its VALUE never was — the exit was householder's insurance or a gift catalogue, and HDFC printed no rupee against either
- Reward Points expired after 18 months
- Add-on cards cost ₹250 a year each, capped at two
- Cash advances cost 2.5% with a ₹150 minimum at other banks' ATMs, and carried interest from the withdrawal date
What these points actually fly
HDFC Bank has not published what this card earns, so there are no points here to fly with — not zero points, and not points that go nowhere: nothing stated either way. The moment a benefit sheet exists we will price whatever it names.
what the cards that DO reach a chart can fly — 2,196 corridors priced →
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, and you have not been able to for a long time. HDFC's own sitemap still listed the Health Plus Credit Card in 2011, but the product pages went 404 that same year, the card has no row in any HDFC MITC this desk can read, and it is absent from the bank's live August 2026 Key Fact Statement and fair-usage table alike. The closest thing HDFC sells today is an ordinary card plus a separately purchased HDFC ERGO policy.
HDFC Bank 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.
- 1 Sept 2026SmartBuy moves Amazon Pay gift cards to 1X under Insta DealsAmazon Pay Gift Voucher sat in SmartBuy's accelerated tier — 'up to 5X Reward Points or 5% cashback' → 'Insta Deals: 1 % Instant Discount + 1X Reward Points' — this brand is out of the accelerated tier
The most-farmed HDFC voucher route stopped being a points play. SmartBuy's own voucher storefront now shows the Amazon Pay Gift Voucher under a new "Insta Deals" tile reading "1 % Instant Discount + 1X Reward Points", and the page's own description flipped from "up to 5X Reward Points or 5% cashback" to "up to 1X". The comparison that settles it sits on the same storefront: the Amazon Fresh voucher still carries an "Accelerated Rewards — Upto 5X Reward Points RPs / 5% Cashback" block that the Amazon Pay page no longer has, so this is one brand leaving the accelerated tier, not the tier closing. The date, honestly: the Insta Deals offer ("Flat 1% OFF", ₹10,000 monthly limit) was already live in the page's own data on 31 August 2026, the reward line still read 5X in the 1 September 16:26 UTC archive capture, and read 1X when this desk fetched the page on 2 September — so 1 September is the community's effective date sitting inside a window we can bracket from primary captures, not a figure HDFC published. The bank has announced nothing and no SmartBuy page carries a notice. Two pieces of context for the size of it: brand vouchers were already sub-capped at 3,000 accelerated points a month from 1 July 2026, and Amazon Pay vouchers disappeared from the portal entirely for stretches of July and August before returning in this shape. Flipkart and Amazon Fresh vouchers still pay the accelerated rate; the ₹10,000-a-month Amazon Pay lane now pays base earn plus the 1% instant discount.
- 18 Aug 2026The Harley-Davidson Diners Club drops out of HDFC's bank-wide MITC
- 6 Aug 2026HDFC caps Regalia Gold miles transfers at 50,000 points a month
- 25 Jul 2026HDFC switches on 22 transfer partners for BizPower
- 16 Jul 2026Regalia Gold's cash-out rate quietly drops to ₹0.15
- 1 Jul 2026HDFC caps SmartBuy brand-voucher rewards
- 1 Jul 2026Regalia Gold's domestic lounge access goes spend-gated
- 1 Jul 2026Diners Club Privilege ties its lounge vouchers to prior-quarter spend
Every HDFC Bank change we've dated → 37 events since 2001, 23 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against HDFC Bank's own documents on
Not published , and we will not invent it: the earn rate and the currency it earns.
Every document behind this page — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official HDFC's own Health Plus eligibility-and-fees page (archived 11-Sep-2003) — the ₹950 annual and renewal fee, the waived joining fee, the ₹250 add-on fee and the falling interest rate
- official HDFC's own Health Plus features page (archived 10-Sep-2003) — the ₹50,000 cashless mediclaim, the ₹1.5 lakh critical-illness cover, the SITA Travels discounts and the 1-point-per-₹100 accrual
- official HDFC Bank Key Fact Statement cum MITC, version 4.6 dated August 2026 — it prices forty-odd variants and names this card nowhere, which is why nothing here is carried forward to today