IDBI Bank Royale Signature
KeepFree forever, four lounge visits a year, and the cheapest money on IDBI's shelf.
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
Welcome: 500 Delight Points on card activation plus 750 more on a first transaction of ₹1,500 or more within 30 days — 1,250 points, worth ₹313
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 →
Pays from the first rupee
At ₹1,000 a month — ₹12,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹100 gross (earn ₹100) against its ₹0 fee = ₹100 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.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #73
Why #73 A lifetime-free Visa Signature with four lounge visits a year and 0.75% on everything is the entry-level lounge answer — it ranks here because it costs nothing to be wrong about, not because it earns much.
The take
Royale Signature is the card IDBI charges nothing for and then quietly makes the most sensible on its own shelf. Joining fee Nil, annual fee Nil, renewal fee Nil, on the primary and every add-on — genuinely lifetime free, with no spend hoop to keep it that way. It carries one complimentary lounge visit per calendar quarter at participating lounges in India on Visa's programme: four a year, which is a real answer at a price of zero. The earn is 3 Delight Points per ₹100 at IDBI's own ₹0.25 a point — 0.75% flat, better than the Winnings card that costs ₹899 — and 1,250 welcome points land for a first transaction of ₹1,500. Two numbers make it the pick over its siblings rather than merely the free one. It revolves at 2.50% a month against 3.40% on Winnings and Eclat, the cheapest money IDBI lends on a card. And its redemption fee is Nil, where the two LIC co-brands charge ₹99 every single time you cash out. What it is not: a travel card. The lounge quota is domestic, the forex markup is the full 3.5%, and Delight Points reach no airline or hotel programme at any ratio — you are redeeming into a catalogue, at a quarter of a rupee, forever. Hold it as a free second card that opens a lounge door four times a year. Do not spend on it abroad.
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
₹2,500 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,100 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹9,300 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹26,300 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹43,200 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
IDBI 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
- Lifetime free: joining, annual and renewal fees all Nil, on the primary and add-ons
- 1 complimentary lounge visit per calendar quarter in India, on Visa's programme
- 0.75% flat — 3 Delight Points per ₹100 — which beats IDBI's ₹899 Winnings card
- 2.50% a month is the lowest interest rate on IDBI's credit-card shelf
- ₹25,00,000 of air-travel accident cover, and no reward-redemption fee
Watch out
- Four lounge visits a year and nothing outside India — this is an entry-level quota
- 3.5% forex markup, so it is the wrong card to carry abroad
- Closed loop — Delight Points buy a catalogue at ₹0.25 apiece and reach no airline or hotel
- Fuel, insurance, tax, government and railway spend earn nothing
- Delight Points expire 36 months after accrual; the first redemption needs 1,000 points
- No published international or add-on lounge benefit, and no golf, concierge or hotel programme
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes IDBI Delight Points 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
12 sourced rules · 3 pay zero
- Fuel · excluded Zero Delight Points — MCC 5541, 5542, 5172 and 5983 are all on the MITC's exclusion annexure. What you get instead is a 1% fuel surcharge refund on transactions between ₹400 and ₹5,000, capped at ₹500 a month
- Insurance · excluded Zero Delight Points — the annexure names 6300 (insurance sales, underwriting and premiums), 6381 (insurance premiums) and 5960 (direct-marketing insurance). It does not name 6380, so a merchant coded there is not covered by the exclusion as IDBI has written it
- Government / tax · excluded Zero Delight Points — the annexure names 9211 (court costs), 9222 (fines), 9311 (tax payments), 9399 (government services NEC) and 9405 (intra-government purchases). It does not name 9402 or 9223
Does your spend count toward the milestones?
not published — and we say which
₹2,00,000 a year is the bar for the first milestone. A different question from the one above — earning points and counting toward a threshold are separate rules, and issuers write them separately.
Not published. IDBI Bank states what the IDBI Bank Royale Signature earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the milestones — 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
72 of 793 tracked doors
Opens 72 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 40 airports , via Visa — see the full map →
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.
IDBI's own credit-card index lists Royale Signature alongside Aspire and Imperium as the bank-issued Visa trio, and it is the only one of the three that is both lifetime free and carries a lounge quota — Aspire is free but has no published lounge, Imperium costs ₹499. If a branch offers you Aspire, ask for Royale by name.
IDBI Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
per the official IDBI 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
7 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
One Key Fact Statement covers IDBI's whole seven-variant shelf. Royale is Nil in all four columns of the KFS fee table — joining, annual, renewal and add-on — so it is lifetime free with no spend hoop. Cash withdrawal is capped at 20% of the credit limit, ₹15,000 daily cap. Cheque or auto-debit return ₹500; card replacement ₹200; duplicate statement ₹100 for anything over three months old; balance transfer 1.5% or ₹199, whichever is higher. Minimum amount due is 5% of the total, min ₹200. Interest-free period 18–48 days. Fuel surcharge waiver 1% on ₹400–₹5,000 transactions, capped at ₹500 a month. IDBI publishes NO income or age criterion for any card variant — not on the product page, not in the KFS, not in the MITC — so the eligibility rows here are honestly empty rather than borrowed from a sibling bank's shelf.
per the official IDBI 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 IDBI Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — 3 Delight Points per ₹100, 1 lounge visit per calendar quarter in India via Visa, joining and annual fee Nil
- official IDBI Key Fact Statement — Royale joining, annual and renewal fees all Nil, 2.50% a month interest, 3.5% cross-currency markup
- official IDBI credit-card MITC — the Delight Points clause, its 3-year expiry and the MCC annexure of spends that earn nothing
- official IDBI's credit-card index — the seven live variants, and where Royale Signature sits among them