PNB Parakram
KeepLifetime free, four lounges a year, and 3% back in the canteen — for JCOs and below.
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: No welcome benefit is published — the milestones start at ₹2.5 lakh of spend
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 ₹100 gross (earn ₹100) against its ₹0 fee = ₹100 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants
The take
Parakram is the most generous lifetime-free card any Indian PSU bank publishes, and the reason nobody writes about it is the gate: PNB issues it to "All Indian army personnel's of JCO/OR rank or below", with a salary slip and an Army identity card as the documents. Inside that gate it is a real card, not a badge. Nil joining fee, nil annual fee, nil on the add-on as well — three separate lines on PNB's own page, which is rarer than it sounds on a card that also carries a lounge quota. That quota is quantified, which puts it ahead of most of PNB's shelf: four domestic visits a year, one per quarter per card, plus one international visit a year. The earn is 2 Reward Points per ₹100 outside PNB's restricted MCC list — half a percent at the ₹0.25 the bank assigns a point, and PNB confirms that value on this card's own milestone table by printing the cashable rupee figure beside each award. Those milestones are modest but real: 2,500 points at ₹2.5 lakh of annual spend, 5,000 at ₹5 lakh, 7,500 at ₹7.5 lakh, cash and wallet spend excluded. The genuinely distinctive benefit is the canteen: 3% cashback on CSD spends, credited at the end of the billing cycle, which is a category no civilian card in India can even address — capped at ₹1,500 a cycle and switched off entirely in any cycle under ₹3,000 of spend. Credit limits are set by rank rather than income: ₹1 lakh up to NCO, ₹2 lakh for JCOs, higher only on special request. Take it as a free card with a small quantified lounge door and one benefit built for exactly one reader.
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
₹2,100 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹4,900 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹9,800 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹21,800 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹33,800 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
Punjab National 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 — PNB publishes Nil joining and Nil annual fees, on the add-on card too
- 4 domestic lounge visits a year (1 per quarter per card) plus 1 international visit a year
- 3% cashback on CSD canteen spends, credited at the end of the billing cycle
- 2 Reward Points per ₹100 outside PNB's restricted MCC list — 0.5% at ₹0.25 a point
- Milestones at ₹2.5 lakh, ₹5 lakh and ₹7.5 lakh of annual spend, worth ₹625, ₹1,250 and ₹1,875
- 1% fuel surcharge waiver between ₹500 and ₹4,000 a transaction, up to ₹350 a billing cycle
Watch out
- Profession-gated by rank: PNB issues it to Indian Army personnel of JCO/OR rank or below, on a salary slip and Army identity card
- The CSD cashback is capped at ₹1,500 a billing cycle and pays nothing at all in a cycle under ₹3,000 of spend
- Credit limits are set by rank, not income — ₹1 lakh up to NCO, ₹2 lakh for JCOs
- PNB names no lounge network for the quota, so the specific doors are unmapped
- 3.5% forex markup — PNB's bank-wide schedule exempts only the LUXURA metal cards
- PNB publishes no welcome benefit for this card, and Reward Points expire three years from accrual
- The restricted MCC list that carves out the earn is referenced by an asterisk and never printed on the page
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes PNB 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 →
Does your spend count toward the milestones?
not published — and we say which
₹2,50,000 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. Punjab National Bank states what the PNB Parakram earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the milestones — the ₹2,50,000 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.
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.
Only if you serve. PNB's page is headed "Specially Designed for Indian Army Personnel" and its Salary Group line reads "All Indian army personnel's of JCO/OR rank or below" (PNB's grammar). You need to be 21 to 70, hold a bureau score of 700 or above, and produce "Latest salary slips and Identity Proof of Indian Army". Officers are pointed at the Premium Metal LUXURA edition instead. The credit limit is then set by rank rather than by income.
Punjab National 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
nothing tracked yet — which is itself a fact
No tracked devaluations or changes yet — this card's history starts here.
Verified against Punjab National 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 PNB Parakram product page — the Army eligibility, the nil fees, the quantified lounge quota, the earn rate, the milestone ladder and the CSD cashback
- official PNB's Credit Card Business Policy circular 07/2026 — the variant tables behind PNB's card shelf and the rank-based limit policy
- official PNB's Most Important Terms and Conditions — the point value this card's milestones imply, and the three-year expiry on Reward Points