IOB Gold Credit Card
DowngradeClosed to new applicants, 0.20% straight off the bill, and a 2.50% forex line worth keeping it for.
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 #708
Why #708 IOB has stopped issuing this card, so what the value model thinks it is worth acquiring is beside the point. It is ranked as what it is for the people who already hold one: a free legacy card worth keeping in the drawer for a foreign swipe at 2.50%, and worth nothing at all as a card to spend on.
The take
IOB Gold is the higher-limit half of IOB's legacy Visa pair, and IOB has stopped selling it — the product page carries the line "*Applicable only for existing Card holders" over both this card and the Classic. If you hold one, the question is whether to keep it, and the answer is probably yes, because it costs nothing: the MITC prints Nil in the joining column and Nil in the annual column. What it pays is 0.20% credited straight against the monthly bill rather than into a points balance, which is the honest shape of a cashback card and is worth exactly what it says — no catalogue, no minimum redemption, no expiry to track. The reason a travel reader should not cut it up is the forex markup: IOB charges 2.50% on international transactions, stated once bank-wide in the MITC, against the 3.5% that is standard in India. On a ₹3 lakh foreign trip that is ₹3,000 you do not pay. Add baggage insurance and purchase protection of ₹25,000 each and air-crash cover of ₹4 lakh, and a free card you already have is a free card worth keeping in the drawer for trips abroad. Nobody new is getting one.
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 one reason to keep it
- 0.20% cash back adjusted straight against the monthly bill, with no catalogue and no redemption minimum
- Credit limit ₹60,000 to ₹5,00,000, plus ₹25,000 of baggage insurance and ₹25,000 of purchase protection
Watch out
- Closed to new applicants — IOB marks the card 'Applicable only for existing Card holders'
- 0.20% is a fifth of a percent; nothing here reaches an airline or a hotel programme
- 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 — so there is no catalogue and no exclusion list to read. 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 GOLD, reading NIL / NIL / NIL / NA across joining, annual, supplementary and the annual-fee-reversal spend — lifetime-free on every line. 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", a sentence that conflates a per-point value with a per-₹100 rate; 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 ₹60,000 to ₹5,00,000. 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. Gold-purchase limit 50% of the card limit. 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 Gold 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