HDFC Bank TMC Credit Card
KeepA free commercial card that can be locked to a list of merchants — and pays nothing at any of them.
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 →
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #551
Why #551 Carried, not ranked. A free commercial card for travel-management spend, sold on closed-loop merchant control and invoice handling — the controls are the product, and HDFC publishes no accrual against them.
The take
TMC is HDFC's card for spend that runs through a travel management company, and its selling point is a fence rather than a return: "The card can be set as closed loop, allowing payments only to pre-selected merchants or merchant categories", with further restrictions by transaction and by vendor or merchant category. For a finance team issuing plastic against airline and hotel invoices, that is the feature — the card physically cannot be spent anywhere it was not meant to be. Around it sits the rest of the commercial apparatus: cut paperwork on requisitions and purchase orders, manage invoices and inventory from multiple airlines and hotels, integrate with the existing ERP, and reduce the processing time and cost of high-volume transactions. The plastic is contactless at retail outlets. It costs nothing — "Joining/Renewal Fees: NIL" on the page and Nil in the Schedule of Charges v2.6 behind it. What that schedule also says is that this is a full-payment instrument: other commercial cards owe "100% of total amount due" every cycle, foreign spend carries the 3.5% commercial markup, and cash paid against the bill costs another 1%. And it pays nothing. HDFC publishes no accrual for this card in any document — no rate, no currency, no cashback line. Read the closed-loop control as the whole return and the card is honest; read the strapline about centralising company costs and expect points, and it is not.
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
- Nil to join and nil a year, printed on the product page and in the Schedule of Charges v2.6 behind it
- Can be set closed loop — payments only to pre-selected merchants or merchant categories
- Further restrictions by transaction and by vendor or merchant category
- Invoices and inventory from multiple airlines and hotels handled in one place, with the paperwork of requisitions and purchase orders cut
- Integrates with an existing ERP, and cuts the processing time and cost of high-volume transactions
- Contactless at retail outlets, PIN-free below ₹5,000 per transaction under the Indian limit
Watch out
- HDFC publishes no reward rate for it anywhere — the control set is the product
- No lounge access is published for it, and it opens no door on our map
- Full payment every cycle: the schedule puts other commercial cards at 100% of the total amount due
- Forex is the 3.5% commercial band, plus 1% dynamic-conversion markup since January 2023
- Paying the bill in cash costs another 1% of the amount
- A closed-loop card is a fence in both directions — it will decline anywhere the programme did not pre-approve
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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
Unusually for this shelf, HDFC publishes a retail-shaped route: an online application page, with identity proof (Aadhaar, PAN), address proof (a utility bill or passport) and income proof — salary slips for the salaried, income tax returns for the self-employed — and the card arrives "in the mail upon approval". The limit is set on "your income, credit history, and eligibility criteria set by HDFC Bank".
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 — 2 of them, each with the day we read it
- official TMC Credit Card product page — the nil fee, the closed-loop merchant control, the contactless plastic and the individual application route
- official HDFC's Commercial Credit Cards Schedule of Charges, Version 2.6 dated 6 January 2025, as served from this card's own path — the nil fee, the full-payment rule and the 3.5% forex band