HDFC Bank Purchase Reward
Keep1.25% back, the best on this shelf — above ₹50 lakh a month, and nothing below it.
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
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 — and a business card's accelerator is usually the point. This card is not on the board, which ranks personal cards only; it is ranked against other business cards on /best/business, where the tax, GST and vendor-payment rungs ARE credited and its ₹ 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 ₹0 gross against its ₹0 fee = ₹0 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 #440
Why #440 Carried, not ranked, and carried with the highest entry price on the board — not in fees, in SPEND. The best cashback rate on HDFC's commercial shelf at 1.25%, and it pays nothing at all until a company puts ₹50 lakh a month through the card.
No points and no programme — the card pays rupees, redeemable as HDFC puts it for "exciting rewards, gift vouchers, or statement credit". The number that matters is the gate in front of them: total monthly spend excluding EMI and fuel must exceed ₹50 lakh before a single rupee is paid, and the cashback is then capped at ₹25 lakh a month per card. That pair — a ₹50 lakh floor and a ₹25 lakh ceiling — describes the company this card was built for more precisely than any benefit on the page does.
The take
Purchase Reward is the volume card in HDFC's free commercial family and its economics are binary. Above ₹50 lakh of monthly spend it pays 1.25% — the best cashback rate anywhere on HDFC's commercial shelf, on a wider list of merchant categories than its Purchase siblings allow, because here both General and Special MCC spends qualify and only EMI, BBPS and fuel are carved out. Below ₹50 lakh it pays nothing whatsoever. There is no taper and no partial rate; HDFC's own answer to "Is there any eligibility criteria for cashback?" is one sentence and it is a threshold. Everything else is built for the same scale: up to ten cards a company, 300 virtual cards a day mintable through the Corporate Service Portal, merchant-category restrictions per card, pre-funding above the credit limit, and a cashback ceiling of ₹25 lakh a month per card. The travel case is the SmartBuy BizDeals portal — 4% off flights and hotels through MMT MyBiz, discounted fares with free meal and seat selection, up to 40% off business travel bookings. What it does not have: lounge access, a points programme, and the 2.5% forex markup its Purchase Premium and Purchase MoneyBack siblings get. This card sits in the schedule's "Other Commercial Cards" forex band at 3.5%, so international spend belongs on one of the other two. The credit period is 45 days rather than 50, and unpaid balances past the due date run at 2.95% a month.
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
₹0 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹0 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹0 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹0 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹0 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
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 the numbers above are the whole 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
- 1.25% cashback — the highest rate on HDFC's commercial shelf
- No joining fee and no renewal fee — HDFC prints "Joining/Renewal Fees: Nil" on the card's own page
- Both General and Special MCC spends earn, unlike the Purchase Premium card's narrow list
- 4% off flights and hotels through MMT MyBiz, and up to 40% off business travel on SmartBuy BizDeals
- Up to ten cards a company, and 300 virtual cards a day from the Corporate Service Portal
- Pre-fund the card above its credit limit, and set merchant-category restrictions per card
- Up to 45 days of interest-free credit
Watch out
- Nothing is paid below ₹50 lakh of monthly spend — HDFC's rule is "Total spends in a month (excluding EMI & fuel spends) have to be above ₹50 lakh", with no taper beneath it
- Cashback is capped at ₹25 lakh a month per card
- EMI, BBPS and fuel spends earn nothing, and an EMI-flagged transaction stays excluded even if it never converts
- Forex is 3.5% here — the Purchase Premium and Purchase MoneyBack siblings pay 2.5% on the same schedule
- No lounge access — HDFC's page names none, and the card opens no door on our map
- The 1.25% is published as "up to", and HDFC publishes no slab table beneath it
- Past the due date the balance runs at 2.95% a month — 35.4% a year
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 →
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.
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 · 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 Purchase Reward product page — the nil joining and renewal fee, the up-to-1.25% cashback and its ₹50 lakh monthly threshold, and the MMT MyBiz travel benefit
- official HDFC's Commercial Credit Cards Schedule of Charges, Version 2.6 dated 6 January 2025 — it names this card in the family heading, prints the nil fee and leaves it in the 3.5% forex band