ICICI Bank Preferred Gold
CancelThe Gold card a dozen ICICI co-brands were built on — and the one ICICI never put a price on.
no published fee to price it against
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 a fee — every net-value number here would be wrong by exactly the fee we can't find. Everything we can source — the earn rate, the transfer routes, the lounge doors — 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 ICICI Bank publishes a fee schedule 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 #1093
Why #1093 The platform under a dozen ICICI co-brands this board already carries — Central, Big Bazaar, Future, Airtel, HPCL, Punjab & Sind, Federal Bank all shipped a "Gold" edition, and this is the card they were editions of. Carried, not ranked: ICICI never priced it on the page it published, its current MITC has no row for it, and the URL now bounces to the card shelf.
i-mint points at the house ₹0.25 — the same unit, renamed twice. i-mint became PAYBACK on 1 July 2011 and Zillion in May 2023, all three under Loyalty Solutions & Research, and the operator's own FAQ says the balance was renamed rather than converted. One point per ₹100 at ₹0.25 is 0.25%, which is as thin as this board gets on a card that earns at all.
The take
This is the plain version. ICICI's retail co-brand shelf of the late 2000s ran on two platforms, Gold and Silver, and almost every partner card this board carries from that era is one of them wearing a retailer's name — Pantaloon's own page for the Central card summarised its base as "All the benefits of Solid Gold Card" and left it at that. The Preferred Gold is that base, sold on its own to customers ICICI called Preferred. What it actually did is short enough to say in a sentence: it paid a reward on ordinary spend, and it waived the fuel surcharge at select HPCL pumps — 2.5% of the transaction or ₹10, whichever was larger. No lounge, no travel benefit, no partner, no milestone. It is on this board because it is the parent of a dozen cards that are, not because a reader in 2026 should want one. What it paid is now on the record: one i-mint point per ₹100 from 1 July 2010, which at a quarter of a rupee a point is a flat 0.25%. That is a quarter of what a mediocre card pays today, and it is the honest number rather than a flattering one. The unit survived the card by fifteen years — i-mint was renamed PAYBACK on 1 July 2011 and Zillion in May 2023, the same programme run by the same company throughout, and its operator's own FAQ is explicit that the balance was renamed and not converted. The older line on the same page, one reward point per ₹200, is in ICICI's own pre-2010 unit and is not priced here: the i-mint terms describe that sweep without ever printing a ratio for it. One thing is still not stated and it is deliberate. ICICI never published a fee for this card: the page that describes it runs to its last bullet without a joining or annual charge, and the bank's current MITC — which still prices HPCL tiers pulled a decade ago — has no Preferred row at all.
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 a fee — every net-value number here would be wrong by exactly the fee we can't find. 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
ICICI 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
- 10 Sep 2026 ICICI's September lounge list drops four doors and adds Bhogapuram issuer-wide
- 29 Aug 2026 ICICI un-reserves Mumbai's Adani Silver lounge — the whole Annexure-1 board gets in issuer-wide
- 1 Jul 2026 ICICI's lounge-gate exemption expires for Adani One and MakeMyTrip 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
- 0.25% on everything — 1 i-mint point per ₹100 from 1 July 2010, at ₹0.25 a point
- The base platform behind ICICI's Gold co-brands — Central, Big Bazaar, Future, Airtel, HPCL, Punjab & Sind and Federal Bank all shipped an edition of it
- Fuel surcharge waived at select HPCL pumps — 2.5% of the transaction or ₹10, whichever is higher
- ICICI's own page for it survives in full, which is more than most cards of its generation manage
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — the product URL now 301s to ICICI's credit-card shelf, while an invented path under the same directory returns a genuine 404, so the page existed and was retired rather than never having been there
- No fee is claimed here: ICICI's own page states none, and the bank's current MITC has no Preferred, Gold or Silver row
- The points went into i-mint, which is Zillion today — a coalition programme, not an ICICI currency, and a balance from this card lives at zillionrewards.in or nowhere
- The older line on ICICI's own page — 1 reward point per ₹200 — is in the bank's pre-2010 unit, and the i-mint terms sweep those into i-mint without ever printing a ratio, so it is not priced here
- Zillion coins expire three years from the transaction, and 24 idle months start an 8-coin-a-month maintenance fee
- No lounge, no travel partner, no airline or hotel route — the fuel-surcharge waiver is the whole benefit besides the base reward
- The fuel waiver was tied to SELECT HPCL pumps, not to fuel spend generally
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes PAYBACK Points (now Zillion Coins) 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.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot. The Preferred page is gone from ICICI's live estate — the URL redirects to the bank's credit-card listing — and none of the cards on that listing is a Preferred Gold. The Gold platform survives only inside the co-brand editions this board carries separately.
ICICI 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.
- 10 Sept 2026ICICI's September lounge list drops four doors and adds BhogapuramThe prior edition opened Bhubaneswar's landside Bird Lounge, Vadodara's Premium Lounge, Visakhapatnam's Airr Lounge and Bar, and Dehradun's landside Bird Lounge, and filed Ahmedabad T2 international as The Lounge opposite Gate 3 → Those four rooms are gone. Bhubaneswar keeps O'Vetra near Gate 8, Dehradun keeps Carnations in the security hold, Vadodara is off the list, and Visakhapatnam's rows are Encalm domestic and international at Bhogapuram. Ahmedabad T2 international is Adani Silver Lounge - International, Gate 08, and it is not asterisked
ICICI re-saved its consolidated domestic lounge list on 10 September 2026 and moved rooms, not quotas. Four doors an Annexure-1 card used to open are off the list: Bhubaneswar's landside Bird Lounge (O'Vetra, airside near Gate 8, stays), Vadodara entirely, Visakhapatnam's Airr Lounge and Bar, and Dehradun's landside Bird Lounge (Carnations, in the security hold, stays). Visakhapatnam's replacement is two Encalm rooms at Bhogapuram, which this map does not carry yet — the airport is not in our coordinate file, so those doors are recorded here and not drawn. Ahmedabad's T2 international row is no longer The Lounge opposite Gate 3. It is Adani Silver Lounge - International, first floor, Gate 08, and the row has no asterisk, so the whole Annexure-1 board gets it at each card's own quarterly quota rather than the three unlimited cards alone. Noida's three Jewar rows are still on the PDF and still unmapped.
- 29 Aug 2026ICICI un-reserves Mumbai's Adani Silver lounge — the whole Annexure-1 board gets in
- 29 Jul 2026Times Black publishes its eligibility bar and swaps BLADE for Thumby Aviation
- 1 Jul 2026ICICI's lounge-gate exemption expires for Adani One and MakeMyTripAdani One ICICI Signature, Adani One ICICI Platinum and the MakeMyTrip ICICI Bank Credit Card were exempt from the ₹75,000-per-quarter spend gate on complimentary domestic lounge access — "valid till Jun 30, 2026" → All three now "require spends of ₹ 75,000 to be made in a calendar quarter to unlock airport lounge access in the next calendar quarter, with effect from Jul 01, 2026"
ICICI's MITC, headed "Last updated on Aug 2nd, 2026", carries the expiry date inside the exemption list itself and then restates it as a dated instruction below. No lounge visit is removed — MakeMyTrip keeps 2 domestic a quarter plus 1 international, Adani One Signature 4 a quarter plus 2 Priority Pass, Adani One Platinum 2 a quarter — but all of them now cost ₹3 lakh of routed annual spend on top of the fee, which reprices the ₹750 Adani One Platinum hardest. The ₹75,000 excludes rent, government, education, EMI, fees, interest, DCC and reversals, and the qualifying quarter is offset (26th to 25th), so the spend that unlocks Oct-Dec was made between 26 June and 25 September. Worth flagging for the desk: ICICI's own "Upcoming changes to Credit Card features and charges" page, re-read 28 August 2026, still lists MakeMyTrip among the exempt cards with no expiry, and never names the Adani One pair at all. Two live ICICI documents, two different answers; the MITC is the regulated one and the more recently dated, so it is the one we follow.
- 1 Feb 2026ICICI gates its BookMyShow movie perk behind quarterly spend
- 15 Jan 2026ICICI caps transport rewards and excludes rent, tax, fuel spends
- 15 Nov 2024ICICI's November purge: rewards, lounges and 1% fees
- 5 Feb 2024ICICI stops rewards on rent and wallet loads
Every ICICI Bank change we've dated → 10 events since 2019, 7 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against ICICI Bank's own documents on
Not published , and we will not invent it: the annual fee.
Every document behind this page — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official ICICI's own Preferred Credit Cards page (archived 15-Jul-2025) — the complete feature list for the Gold, and no fee anywhere on it
- official The loyalty programme's own FAQ, published on payback.in during the changeover (archived 01-Jul-2011) — it names i-mint and PAYBACK in one document and says the points were renamed, not converted
- official ICICI's current bank-wide MITC — the fee oracle for the whole shelf, and it has no Preferred, Gold or Silver row
- official The live URL — it redirects to ICICI's credit-card shelf, which is what a retired page does