Kotak Aqua Gold
KeepA card for people who need the cash, not the points. It pays no points at all.
no published earn rate to price
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. Everything we can source — the fee, the charges, the migration that put this card in your hand — is above and stands on its own; this card is simply not on the board, not in the calculator, and cannot win a best-of call until Kotak Mahindra Bank publishes terms we can cite.
Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #872
Why #872 Carried, not ranked — there is no earn rate to rank. Aqua Gold pays nothing per swipe in any currency; its whole proposition is cheaper cash. It costs ₹0 a year, so nobody holding one has a reason to close it, but nobody choosing a card should be choosing this one.
The take
Every other card on this board is trying to pay you for spending. Aqua Gold is trying to make borrowing cheaper, and it is the only Kotak card built entirely around that idea. Cash advances run at 2.99% a month against the 3.30–3.75% the rest of the Kotak shelf charges, you get up to 48 interest-free days on a cash withdrawal rather than interest from day one, and the cash limit is 90% of your credit limit where a normal gold card gives you 40%. Kotak's own value chart totals the whole proposition at ₹4,040 a year, and ₹3,720 of that is interest you did not pay. There is no reward programme. Not a bad one — none. Aqua does not appear in the list of twenty-eight Kotak cards that carry the Reward Points Program, the value chart has no reward row, and the phrase "reward point" does not occur on any page of the product. The only thing that pays out is an annual milestone: spend ₹1,50,000 in a card year and take four PVR tickets or ₹750 in cash. That is 0.5% on the qualifying spend, once, and nothing on the rupee before or after it. It is a secured card — the credit limit is 80% of a term deposit you pledge, minimum ₹25,000, which is also why Kotak could hand it to an 18-year-old with no income proof and call it free for life. Free it genuinely is: nil joining, nil annual, nil add-on. Kotak has since withdrawn it; the current cardholder agreement does not name Aqua anywhere, not even in the secured-card clause that still names three other FD-backed products. If you hold one, there is no fee to escape and a cheaper cash rate to keep. If you are shopping, this is a museum piece.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
There is no renewal arithmetic to run on this card yet — and a break-even we cannot source is not one we will print.
the whole desk — what changed, the downgrade, and what we cannot price →
Keep, downgrade or cancel
what we can and cannot price
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. A break-even is the spend at which value crosses a fee, and we are short one side of that sentence — so this desk prints no ladder, no crossing and no ₹0 standing in for either. What we can source about this card is under Sources.
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
Kotak Mahindra 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 we cannot price either side of it.
What has changed under this card
- 1 Jun 2025 Kotak's June-2025 fee wave washes over the premium deck issuer-wide
- 12 Feb 2025 RBI lifts Kotak's ten-month card-issuance ban 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
- Genuinely free for life — nil joining, nil annual, nil add-on, all three printed by Kotak
- Cash advances at 2.99% a month with up to 48 interest-free days, against 3.30–3.75% and day-one interest elsewhere on the Kotak shelf
- A 90% cash limit where a normal gold card gives 40% — up to ₹12 lakh of credit limit
- ₹1,50,000 of annual spend takes four PVR tickets or ₹750 in cash, your choice
- Fuel surcharge waived at every domestic pump, not a tied oil company, on transactions of ₹500–₹3,000
Watch out
- There is NO reward programme — Aqua is absent from the list of Kotak cards carrying the Reward Points Program, and no page of the product mentions a reward point
- Secured: the credit limit is 80% of a term deposit you pledge, minimum ₹25,000, individual TDs only
- The milestone is the entire payout, and it needs ₹1,50,000 in a card year to release ₹750
- 3.5% forex markup, and the card is India-resident only
- Cash still costs ₹300 a withdrawal per ₹10,000 or part thereof — the 48 free days are on the interest, not the fee
- Aqua Shield covers only ₹50,000 of fraudulent use, and only the 7 days before you report the card lost
- Withdrawn — Kotak's current cardholder agreement does not name Aqua in any table, including the secured-card clause that still names three other FD-backed cards
What these points actually fly
Kotak Mahindra Bank has not published what this card earns, so there are no points here to fly with — not zero points, and not points that go nowhere: nothing stated either way. The moment a benefit sheet exists we will price whatever it names.
what the cards that DO reach a chart can fly — 2,196 corridors priced →
Does your spend count toward the milestones?
not published — and we say which
₹1,50,000 a year is the bar for the first milestone. A different question from the one above — earning points and counting toward a threshold are separate rules, and issuers write them separately.
Not published. Kotak Mahindra Bank states what the Kotak Aqua Gold earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the milestones — the ₹1,50,000 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
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?
the route in — no cutoffs published
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.
You cannot. Kotak has withdrawn the Aqua Gold and removed its product page. When it was sold, the gate was a term deposit rather than an income: age 18 to 75 for the primary cardholder, 18 and above for an add-on, a minimum term deposit of ₹25,000, individual deposits only, and Indian residency. The live FD-backed Kotak cards are the Dream Different (₹5,000 deposit, since revised to ₹10,000) and the Silk Inspire Platinum (₹50,000) — both of which, unlike Aqua, do earn reward points.
Kotak Mahindra 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.
- 30 Sept 2026Dream Different's unredeemed reward points expire after 30 September 2026Reward points accrued on the Dream Different Credit Card up to 31 March 2026 sitting in the account with no stated expiry date → A hard forfeiture date — "After 30th September, 2026, any unredeemed Reward Points will automatically expire"
The second half of the note that closed the programme is the part holders can still act on. Kotak's cardholder agreement gives every Dream Different point accrued up to 31 March 2026 a six-month redemption window that shuts on 30 September 2026, after which unredeemed points are forfeited outright. At the agreement's own conversion rate of 25 paise per point, a year of the card's headline 4-points-per-₹100 online earn on ₹1 lakh of online spend is roughly 4,000 points, about ₹1,000 — small money, but money that becomes zero on 1 October. Points redeem against the Kotak catalogue (flights, hotels, vouchers, merchandise) or as a statement credit through the rewards portal or the contact centre, each with its own minimum, so a last-week redemption risks missing the date on processing alone.
- 1 Sept 2026Kotak's Dream Different joining fee goes ₹250 → ₹424 and the waiver disappears
- 1 Sept 2026Kotak halves dynamic currency conversion on Dream Different, 3.5% to 2%
- 1 Apr 2026Kotak discontinues the reward points programme on Dream Different
- 1 Jun 2025Kotak guts Privy League Signature and pulls it from sale
- 1 Jun 2025Kotak's June-2025 fee wave washes over the premium deck
- 12 Feb 2025RBI lifts Kotak's ten-month card-issuance ban
- 12 May 2022Kotak quietly lists White Reserve — a card with no earn rate
Every Kotak Mahindra Bank change we've dated → 8 events since 2022, 5 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against Kotak Mahindra Bank's own documents on
Not published , and we will not invent it: the earn rate and the currency it earns.
Every document behind this page — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Aqua Gold product page (archived 20-Jul-2019) — free for life, the 48-day interest-free cash window, the ₹1.5 lakh milestone and the 80%-of-deposit credit limit
- official Aqua Gold fees and charges (archived 24-Aug-2019) — nil on every fee line, 2.99% a month on balances, and a 3.5% forex markup
- official Aqua Gold value chart (archived 17-Aug-2019) — Kotak's own arithmetic for the card, built entirely from interest saved and surcharges waived, with no reward row in it
- official Aqua Gold eligibility (archived 17-Aug-2019) — a ₹25,000 term deposit rather than an income, and an 18-to-75 age band
- official Retail Credit Card Agreement & Schedule of charges (31-Jul-2026) — the current Kotak shelf, which names neither Aqua nor any rewards programme for it