IDFC FIRST Corporate
KeepLifetime free, eight lounge visits a year that work abroad, and 2% back on foreign spend.
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 (earn ₹0) 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 #467
Why #467 A business card carried, not ranked. What it is: a lifetime-free corporate T&E card with eight lounge visits a year that work at home or abroad, ₹1 crore of air-accident cover and a real published earn rate — rare on this shelf.
IDFC FIRST Reward Points redeem at ₹0.25 across this shelf, and there is no portal rung above it on the corporate card — no ₹0.50 app-travel rate like Mayura's, no ₹1.00 like Gaj's. The currency is closed-loop: IDFC runs no airline or hotel transfer partners at all, so the points are a catalogue currency and nothing more.
The take
FIRST Corporate is the most legible thing on India's commercial shelf, which on this page is high praise: IDFC publishes the fee, the APR, the markup, the insurance limits, the lounge quota, the reward rate and the twelve excluded MCC groups by number, where most issuers publish a positioning statement and a relationship manager's email. It is lifetime free, and the lounge quota is unusually flexible — two visits a quarter, eight a year, and IDFC lets you spend them "domestic and/or international" against its own published lounge list rather than splitting them the way every other corporate card here does. The insurance is the strongest on this shelf too: ₹1 crore of air-accident cover, ₹10 lakh personal accident, USD 500 for lost checked baggage, USD 300 each for a delayed flight and a lost passport, plus ₹50,000 apiece on lost card liability, credit shield and purchase protection, and fidelity cover for the company against employee fraud. Where the money used to sting is forex: it was 3.5% plus GST — the Indian norm — and the corporate MITC (ModDate 7 Sep 2026) now prints 0%. The earn table still pays 10 Reward Points per ₹125 on international spend and only 2 on domestic. Domestic spend earns 0.4%, twelve MCC groups earn nothing at all, and the points are a closed-loop catalogue currency with no airline or hotel exit. Take it for the lounges, the insurance and the price.
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
₹1,200 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹2,400 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹4,800 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹14,400 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹24,000 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
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
- Lifetime free — ₹0 to join and ₹0 a year, printed as one figure
- 2 lounge visits a quarter, usable domestic OR international, against IDFC's own published lounge list
- 10 Reward Points per ₹125 on international spends including DCC — 2% at the ₹0.25 house value
- ₹1 crore air-accident cover, ₹10 lakh personal accident, USD 500 lost baggage and USD 300 flight delay
- Free roadside assistance worth ₹1,499 with each card
- Fidelity insurance for the corporate — cover against employee fraud, which a T&E card genuinely needs
- 45-day interest-free period and a card-management portal that issues and controls employee cards
Watch out
- 0% forex since the Sep-2026 corporate MITC (was 3.5% + GST) — on a card whose best earn rung is still international spend
- Domestic spend earns 0.4%; twelve MCC groups earn nothing at all, including utilities, fuel, insurance, transport and supermarkets
- IDFC Reward Points are closed-loop — no airline or hotel transfer partner exists, at any ratio
- The cashback alternative is a ceiling, not a rate: "up to 150bps", and the company picks one arm or the other at corporate level
- 36% APR on revolved balances
- The lounge quota is a shared eight a year, so four international visits leave four domestic
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
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.
Through the company. IDFC issues a corporate limit and the business allocates it across employee cards through a card-management portal that lets it "View, manage and issue T&E cards to the employees". The reward construct — cashback or points — is chosen at corporate level. No turnover or income cutoff is published for the card itself.
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 — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official IDFC FIRST corporate MITC (ModDate 7 Sep 2026) — NIL joining/annual; "Markup Charges on foreign currency transaction including DCC **" → 0%
- official FIRST Corporate product guide (V6, 2 Jun 2025) — ₹0 fee, two reward rungs, quarterly lounges, insurance schedule
- official FIRST Corporate product page — the lifetime-free positioning, the worldwide lounge access and the roadside assistance
- official IDFC FIRST Corporate Lounge Program list — the enumerated Indian lounges the quarterly quota opens, with a separate global list linked from it