Indian Overseas Bank RuPay Select
KeepEight domestic lounge visits a year, two international, and 2.50% forex — from a PSU bank almost nobody checks.
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 →
Breaks even only by erasing its fee at ₹9,000 a month
At ₹9,000 a month — ₹1,08,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹300 gross (earn ₹300) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹500 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,00,000 a year = ₹300 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.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #621
Why #621 The value model prices earn, and this card's earn is a quarter of a percent in points that cannot leave the bank. It is on the board for the two things a traveller actually uses — eight domestic lounge visits a year that IOB states for this card by name, and a 2.50% forex markup a full point under the Indian norm — and it is ranked where a card whose points reach no airline belongs.
The take
IOB's RuPay Select is the quiet surprise of the public-sector shelf. It is not a rewards card in any serious sense — one point per ₹100 at 25 paise a point is a quarter of a percent, and the points are a closed loop that redeems into IOB's own merchandise, gift-card and travel catalogue and go nowhere else. What it is, is a cheap airport door. IOB states the quota in its own words, not as a generic RuPay tier claim: two domestic lounge visits a quarter and two international visits a calendar year. That is eight domestic entries a year on a card whose ₹500 annual fee reverses at ₹1,00,000 of spend and which costs nothing to get — the MITC's joining column reads Nil. Add the forex markup, which is 2.50% against an Indian norm of 3.5%, and this card clears two of the site's five travel gates outright while sitting at the very bottom of the earn table. The catch is the entry price in the other sense: RuPay Select is IOB's super-premium variant, so the credit limit starts at ₹2,00,000 for a public applicant, and IOB wants ₹15,000 a month of salary or ₹3 lakh of gross annual income and a CIBIL score of 700 before it will talk. Take it for the lounge and the forex line, and spend on something else.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card reaches break-even by ERASING its fee, not by out-earning it: the waiver is the decision.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹500/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 joining, then ₹500/yr
The waiver ₹1,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹8,333 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹9,000 a month — ₹1,08,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee, and it gets there by erasing the fee at the waiver rather than out-earning it.
At your spend
₹800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹9,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹15,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
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
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
- 2 domestic lounge visits per quarter and 2 international per calendar year — IOB publishes the quota for this card by name
- 2.50% forex markup, a full point under the 3.5% most Indian issuers charge
- ₹0 to get and ₹500 a year to keep, reversed at ₹1,00,000 of annual spend
- NPCI personal accident cover of ₹10 lakh, and a 1% fuel-surcharge waiver on fills of ₹400–₹5,000 capped at ₹250 a cycle
Watch out
- A quarter of a percent back, and the points cannot leave IOB — merchandise, gift cards, travel bookings, recharge and DTH only, with no transfer partner of any kind
- 1,000 points is the minimum redemption, so ₹4,00,000 of spend before the first ₹250 comes back
- The credit limit starts at ₹2,00,000 for the public — this is IOB's top variant, not an entry card
- IOB's own Schedule of Charges still footnotes the three RuPay variants as 'proposed to be launched' while the product page describes them as live; the MITC carries no such footnote
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 — not on the credit-card page, not in the MITC, not in the Schedule of Charges. So this row states only the deviations IOB does document, and every other category answers "not published" rather than a guess.
per Indian Overseas Bank T&C · rank every card by spend category →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹1,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹500 fee. A different question from the one above — earning points and counting toward a threshold are separate rules, and issuers write them separately.
Not published. Indian Overseas Bank states what the Indian Overseas Bank RuPay Select earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹1,00,000 bar. We won't guess it from the earn table or from a sibling card: Axis published three cards' rules on one day and all three lists differed. If you hold this card and have it in writing from the issuer, send us the document and we'll source it.
Lounge access
17 of 793 tracked doors
Opens 17 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 10 airports , via RuPay — see the full map →
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.
IOB's fee table has FIVE columns — Joining fee, Annual fee, Supplementary card fee, and Minimum spends for Annual Fee reversal — and RuPay Select reads NIL / 500+GST / NIL / ₹1,00,000. Free to get, ₹500 plus GST to keep, reversed at ₹1,00,000 of annual spend. Fuel-surcharge waiver 1% on transactions of ₹400 to ₹5,000, capped at ₹250 a billing cycle, stated card-agnostically in the MITC while the product page leaves the RuPay Classic column blank. Interest-free period 20 to 50 days. Minimum amount due 10% of billed transactions plus interest and charges and GST, subject to a minimum of ₹100. Billing cycle the 21st to the 20th; due date the twentieth day after billing. PIN replacement NIL and card replacement ₹100 plus GST in the MITC — IOB's Schedule of Charges disagrees on both (₹20 a PIN incident, and fuel surcharge printed as a charge rather than a waiver) and still footnotes the three RuPay variants as "proposed to be launched"; the desk reads the MITC as the later document. 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 — 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, lounge quota, fuel-surcharge waiver and credit-limit band
- official IOB's Most Important Terms and Conditions — the fee table (Nil to join, ₹500 + GST a year, reversed at ₹1,00,000 of spend) and the 2.50% forex markup
- official NPCI circular hosted by IOB — the RuPay insurance programme covering Platinum and Select cards for FY 2025-26
- official IOB's Schedule of Charges — the same fee table, and the footnote still marking the RuPay variants as proposed