IDFC FIRST Business
KeepTwo cards, one name: 1.5% a month, or double the points. Both get the lounge.
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 for itself at ₹17,000 a month
At ₹17,000 a month — ₹2,04,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,000 gross (earn ₹1,000) against its ₹999 fee = ₹0 net — the first rung at or above ₹0. 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 #505
Why #505 A business card carried, not ranked. What it is: two cards behind one name — pick a 1.5% monthly APR or a doubled earn table — with eight spend-gated lounge visits a year, 0% forex and the fattest app-travel bonus on India's commercial shelf.
IDFC prints the rate in the rewards T&C itself — "1 Reward Point = ₹0.25" — which is the house value for IDFC FIRST Reward Points, so nothing here is marked up or discounted. Two things are better than on IDFC's retail shelf: the points never expire, and redemption is free ("There are no charges for redemption of Reward points. Reward Points are never expiring"), against ₹99 a redemption on the consumer cards. The currency is still closed-loop — IDFC runs no airline or hotel transfer partner at all, at any ratio.
The take
FIRST Business is the only card on this shelf that makes you choose your own economics at application, and the choice is stark. Take the low-APR arm and you revolve at 1.5% a month in year one and 2% after, against an industry that charges 2–3%; take the high-rewards arm and you revolve at 3% but every earn rung doubles — 10 Reward Points per ₹100 on foreign currency, 4 on business utility and digital advertising, 2 on rentals, restaurants and utilities. Read that table carefully, because it is the whole reward program: IDFC's own T&C says "Reward Points are only earned on the below reward categories", so a vendor payment outside those three groups earns nothing at all. What lifts the card is what sits on top. Forex is 0% (commercial MITC Sep 2026 Nil; was 1.99%). Two lounge visits a quarter work at home or abroad, gated on ₹20,000 of spend the previous month. And the app-travel bonus is genuinely the fattest on India's commercial shelf: 30 bonus Reward Points per ₹100 on hotels and 20 on flights booked in IDFC's own app, which is 32 and 22 points in total, or 8% and 5.5% at a published ₹0.25 — capped at 8,000 bonus points a calendar month, so about ₹25,000 of hotel booking a month is where it stops paying. The insurance is the same strong package the corporate card gets: ₹1 crore of air-accident cover, ₹10 lakh personal accident, USD 500 for lost checked baggage and USD 300 each for a delayed flight and a lost passport. The list price is ₹999 to join and ₹999 a year; IDFC is currently striking the joining charge down to ₹499, which is an offer and not a second price.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
Here is the fee, the spend that clears it, and everything that has moved under this card since you last decided.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹999/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹999/yr
Break-even ₹17,000 a month — ₹2,04,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹2,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹17,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹29,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
Everyday earn plus milestones, minus the fee — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
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
IDFC FIRST 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
- 9 Sep 2026 IDFC FIRST Bank zeroes forex markup on every credit card issuer-wide
- 18 Jun 2026 IDFC FIRST bolts a 24-month expiry onto reward points that were lifetime-valid issuer-wide
- 6 Jan 2026 IDFC FIRST launches zero-forex Diamond Reserve card 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% forex markup since the Sep-2026 commercial MITC (was 1.99%)
- 2 lounge visits a quarter, domestic or international, on ₹20,000 spent the previous month
- 30 bonus Reward Points per ₹100 on app hotel bookings and 20 on flights — 8% and 5.5% at ₹0.25
- 10 Reward Points per ₹100 on foreign currency on the high-rewards arm — 2.5% back
- Pick your own APR: 1.5% a month in year one and 2% after, or 3% with every earn rung doubled
- ₹1 crore air-accident cover, ₹10 lakh personal accident, USD 500 lost baggage and USD 300 flight delay
- Reward Points never expire and cost nothing to redeem — the retail cards charge ₹99 a redemption
Watch out
- Rewards are earned ONLY on foreign currency, business utility and digital advertising, and rentals/restaurants/utilities — every other spend earns zero
- The lounge quota is spend-gated: ₹20,000 the previous month, every month you want to use it
- The app-travel bonus caps at 8,000 Reward Points a calendar month — roughly ₹25,000 of hotel booking
- From 18 June 2026 rewards are capped at your credit limit per billing cycle; spend beyond it earns nothing
- Choosing the high-rewards arm means revolving at 3% a month — double the low-APR arm's year-one rate
- IDFC Reward Points are closed-loop — no airline or hotel transfer partner exists, at any ratio
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes IDFC FIRST Reward 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 →
Lounge access
38 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: ₹20,000 spent in the previous month
Opens 38 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 24 airports — 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.
A business, with or without an IDFC current account — the bank is explicit that "Having Current account with IDFC FIRST Bank is not a requirement" and offers a do-it-yourself digital journey. Cards for employees and directors are issued against the business's own sanctioned limit, with "no limit on the number of cards, as long as they collectively do not exceed the overall Credit Limit given to the Corporate/ Business". The APR-versus-rewards variant is chosen at application.
IDFC FIRST 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.
- 9 Sept 2026IDFC FIRST Bank zeroes forex markup on every credit cardA per-card markup table — Nil on a few premium cards, 1% to 3.5% on the rest → NIL on foreign-currency transactions and on dynamic and static currency conversion, bank-wide
IDFC's retail credit-card MITC, re-saved 9 September 2026, replaces the old per-card forex table with one NIL row covering foreign-currency transactions and dynamic and static currency conversion. The commercial and corporate MITCs, re-saved 7 September, print Nil or 0% for the business and corporate cards. Ashva's brochure, re-issued 10 September, says the same and also cuts that card's international earn from 5 reward points per ₹150 to 2X. A widely reported 26 October cut to international reward earning is not in any of those documents, so it is not on the cards. Cards that were already Nil — Mayura, Gaj, WOW, WOW Black, FIRST Private, Diamond Reserve — did not move.
- 18 Jun 2026Mayura's app-travel multipliers cut to 40X hotels, 25X flights
- 18 Jun 2026LIC IDFC FIRST Select's app-travel bonus cut to 20% hotels, 8% flights
- 18 Jun 2026Ashva's app-travel multipliers cut to 40X hotels, 25X flights
- 18 Jun 2026IDFC FIRST bolts a 24-month expiry onto reward points that were lifetime-valid
- 18 Jun 2026IDFC FIRST Select's 10X moves to categories, app travel bonus cut
- 18 Jun 2026Gaj stops earning past your credit limit
- 18 Jun 2026FIRST Wealth's app-travel bonus falls from 33% to 20%
Every IDFC FIRST Bank change we've dated → 11 events since 2023, 7 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against IDFC FIRST Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official FIRST Business product page and FAQs — the two variants and their rates, the spend-gated lounge quota, the full insurance schedule (page may still say 1.99% forex; commercial MITC is Nil)
- official FIRST Business rewards T&C — the two-column earn table, the ₹0.25 redemption rate and the app-travel bonus with its 8,000-point monthly cap
- official IDFC FIRST commercial MITC, effective 18-Jun-2026 (BC_MITC_FEB25) — ₹999 joining and ₹999 annual, the 15–36% APR band, NIL forex (was 1.99%) and the fuel-surcharge waiver
- official 18-Jun-2026 change communication — rewards capped at the credit limit per billing cycle, and the ₹1,399 roadside-assistance figure
- official IDFC FIRST Business lounge list — the enumerated rooms the quarterly quota opens