Indian Overseas Bank RuPay Classic
DowngradeFree forever, and it earns a sixth of a percent — IOB's basic variant is a payment card, not a rewards card.
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 bonus for this card on its product page or in the MITC
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 #623
Why #623 Free to hold and close to empty: no lounge, a fuel-surcharge cell IOB leaves blank, no accident cover, and a sixth of a percent in points that redeem only into IOB's own catalogue. The 2.50% forex markup is the single travel-relevant fact on the card, and one good line does not carry a ranking.
The take
RuPay Classic is where IOB starts, and the bank is honest about how little is here: the product page's three-column feature table leaves this column blank on lounge access, on the fuel-surcharge waiver and on the NPCI accident cover, and prints a "-" in each. What is left is one reward point per ₹150 at 25 paise a point — a sixth of a percent — in a currency that redeems only into IOB's own merchandise, gift-card, travel, recharge and DTH catalogue and reaches no airline or hotel anywhere. You need 500 points before you can redeem anything, which is ₹75,000 of spend for ₹125. The one genuinely good line is the forex markup: 2.50%, stated once bank-wide in the MITC, a full point under the 3.5% almost every Indian issuer charges. That is the only reason a travel reader should look at this card at all, and on a free card with a credit limit of ₹10,000 to ₹50,000 it is a reason worth about ₹1,000 on a ₹1 lakh foreign trip. It costs nothing to hold. It also does almost nothing.
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
₹500 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,000 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹2,000 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹6,000 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹10,000 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
- Genuinely lifetime-free — IOB's MITC prints Nil in both the joining and the annual column
- 2.50% forex markup, a full point under India's 3.5% norm and the only travel-relevant thing on the card
- 1 Reward Point per ₹150 at ₹0.25 a point, redeemable for merchandise, gift cards, travel, recharge and DTH
Watch out
- No lounge access — IOB's feature table prints a dash in this column where Platinum and Select carry a quota
- No NPCI personal accident cover: the accident row is blank here, and NPCI's own circular covers RuPay Platinum and Select cards only
- IOB's product page leaves the fuel-surcharge cell blank for this variant while the MITC states the 1% waiver card-agnostically — the two documents disagree and IOB has not reconciled them
- 500 points is the minimum redemption, so ₹75,000 of spend before the first ₹125 comes back
- Credit limit tops out at ₹50,000 for a public applicant (₹59,000 for IOB staff)
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes IOB 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 →
What earns, what doesn't
3 sourced rules
IOB publishes NO merchant-category exclusion list for any card it issues. This row states only the deviations IOB documents; every other category answers "not published" rather than a guess.
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.
Not confirmed on sale — the issuer still documents this card but we could not confirm it is open to new applications. Treat any application path with care.
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.
Genuinely lifetime-free: the MITC fee table reads NIL / NIL / NIL / NA across joining, annual, supplementary and the annual-fee-reversal spend. CONFLICT WORTH KNOWING — IOB's MITC states the 1% fuel-surcharge waiver (₹400 to ₹5,000, capped ₹250 a billing cycle) for the card range as a whole with no variant carve-out, while the product page prints a dash in this variant's fuel cell. The desk records both readings rather than picking one. The product page also leaves this variant's lounge and personal-accident cells blank, and NPCI's own circular covers RuPay Platinum and Select cards only. Interest-free period 20 to 50 days. Minimum amount due 10% of billed transactions plus interest and charges and GST, minimum ₹100. Billing cycle the 21st to the 20th. PIN replacement NIL and card replacement ₹100 plus GST per the MITC; the Schedule of Charges says ₹20 a PIN incident and still footnotes the RuPay variants as "proposed to be launched". Credit limit ₹10,000 to ₹50,000 for the public, ₹59,000 for IOB staff.
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 — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official IOB's credit-card page — the RuPay features table that states this card's earn rate and credit-limit band, and leaves its lounge, fuel and accident cells blank
- 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 NPCI circular hosted by IOB — the RuPay insurance programme, which covers Platinum and Select cards and not this one
- official IOB's Schedule of Charges — the same Nil fee row, and the footnote still marking the RuPay variants as proposed