IOB Classic Credit Card
DowngradeIOB's oldest card, shut to new applicants, and still the cheapest way it sells you a foreign transaction.
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: Not published — IOB states no welcome, activation or first-transaction benefit for this card
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 — 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 ₹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.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #709
Why #709 Closed to new applicants and identical to its Gold sibling except for a credit limit a third the size, so the model's estimate of its acquisition value is beside the point. It ranks here as a free legacy card kept for one cheap foreign transaction, not as a card anyone should be earning on.
The take
IOB Classic is the entry half of the bank's legacy Visa pair and IOB no longer issues it: the product page prints "*Applicable only for existing Card holders" over the block. It is identical to IOB Gold in everything that matters except the credit limit, which runs ₹10,000 to ₹50,000 instead of ₹60,000 to ₹5,00,000. Both are lifetime-free on IOB's own fee table — Nil to join, Nil a year, Nil for add-ons — and both pay 0.20% credited straight against the monthly bill rather than into a points balance, so there is no catalogue to navigate, no redemption minimum and nothing to expire. A fifth of a percent is not a reason to spend on it. The 2.50% forex markup is a reason to keep it: it is a full point under the 3.5% almost every Indian issuer charges, and IOB states it once, bank-wide, in the MITC. Behind that sit ₹25,000 each of baggage insurance and purchase protection and ₹4 lakh of air-crash cover. If it is already in your wallet, it is the cheapest card IOB will ever give you for a foreign swipe. If it is not, there is no way in.
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
₹600 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,200 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹2,400 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹7,200 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹12,000 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
Indian Overseas 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 on IOB's own fee table — Nil to join, Nil a year, Nil for add-ons
- 2.50% forex markup against India's 3.5% norm — the only reason to carry it abroad
- 0.20% cash back adjusted straight against the monthly bill, with no catalogue and no redemption minimum
- ₹25,000 of baggage insurance, ₹25,000 of purchase protection and ₹4 lakh of air-crash cover
Watch out
- Closed to new applicants — IOB marks the card 'Applicable only for existing Card holders'
- Credit limit tops out at ₹50,000, a third of what the Gold variant starts at
- IOB's own sentence, 'cash back of Rs. 0.20 per point for every Rs. 100/- spent', conflates a per-point value with a per-₹100 rate — both readings give 0.20%, but the bank has never restated it cleanly
- Interest runs at 2.50% a month (30% a year) and the minimum due is 10% plus charges — a revolving balance here is expensive
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Statement cashback (₹) 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
3 sourced rules
IOB publishes NO merchant-category exclusion list for any card it issues, and the 0.20% here is credited against the monthly outstanding rather than accrued as points. This row states the deviations IOB documents and nothing else.
per Indian Overseas Bank T&C · rank every card by spend category →
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?
income, age and the route in
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.
per the official Indian Overseas 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.
Listed in the MITC fee table as VISA Classic, reading NIL / NIL / NIL / NA across joining, annual, supplementary and the annual-fee-reversal spend. IOB no longer issues it: the product page marks the Classic and Gold block "*Applicable only for existing Card holders". Earn is stated as "cash back of Rs. 0.20 per point for every Rs. 100/- spent... adjusted towards the monthly outstanding" — the sentence conflates a per-point value with a per-₹100 rate, and both readings give 0.20%. Interest-free period 20 to 50 days. Minimum amount due 10% plus interest and charges and GST, minimum ₹100. Fuel-surcharge waiver 1% on ₹400 to ₹5,000, capped ₹250 a billing cycle. Credit limit ₹10,000 to ₹50,000. Baggage insurance ₹25,000 and purchase protection ₹25,000; personal accident cover ₹4 lakh self and ₹2 lakh spouse for death by air crash, ₹2 lakh and ₹1 lakh by road or rail. Card not valid for foreign-currency transactions in Nepal and Bhutan.
per the official Indian Overseas 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 Indian Overseas Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official IOB's credit-card page — the Classic feature block with the earn statement, the credit-limit band, the insurance cover and the existing-holders-only note
- official IOB's Most Important Terms and Conditions — the fee table showing Nil to join and Nil a year, and the 2.50% forex markup
- official IOB's Schedule of Charges — the same Nil fee row for the Visa variants, with the cash-advance, over-limit and late-payment lines