PNB SALARY RuPay Select
KeepGenuinely lifetime-free with PNB's best-quantified lounge quota — gated on a PNB salary account, not a profession.
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: 300 Reward Points on a first retail or online transaction within 90 days of receiving the 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants
The take
The best lounge quota on PNB's non-metal shelf, and the one PSU salary card whose quota is stated in NPCI's own terms rather than a bare marketing line: 8 domestic lounge visits a year (2 a quarter) plus 2 international visits a year, run through the NPCI RuPay Select programme at the airports listed on rupay.co.in/lounges — the same citation PNB states explicitly on the sibling Salary Platinum page. Both the joining and annual fee are a flat Nil in PNB's own Key Fact Statement, no spend threshold required. The gate is a banking relationship, not a profession or a wealth screen — you need a PNB salary account under the OPTIMA or IMPERIAL schemes with gross monthly income above ₹75,000 — the same shape that already admits axis-burgundy-private and kotak-privy-league-signature onto this board. Layer on quarterly Myntra, Ola/Uber and Bigbasket vouchers, three months of Swiggy One, a year of Gaana Plus and an annual health check-up, and this reads as the strongest value-for-cost card PNB has published — the earn itself is thin (2 points per ₹150 at a flat ₹0.25, roughly 0.33%), so hold it for the quota and the free-forever fee, not the points.
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
₹1,000 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹2,000 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹4,000 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹12,000 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹20,000 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
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
- 8 domestic lounge visits a year (2/quarter) + 2 international visits a year — the best-quantified quota on PNB's non-metal shelf, stated under NPCI's own RuPay Select programme
- Genuinely free — Nil joining, Nil annual fee, no spend threshold to clear
- Quarterly Myntra ₹250, Ola/Uber ₹100, Bigbasket/Blinkit ₹250 vouchers; 3 months Swiggy One; 12 months Gaana Plus; annual health check-up
- Gated on a PNB salary account (OPTIMA/IMPERIAL, ₹75,000+/month) rather than profession or high net worth
Watch out
- The 300-point first-transaction bonus is on PNB's Rewardz programme page under this card's BIN band, not on the card's own page — the recurring quarterly vouchers below are benefits, not a welcome bonus
- Requires an active PNB salary account under the OPTIMA or IMPERIAL scheme — not available to a general applicant
- Retail-category earn is a flat ~0.33% (2 RP/₹150 at ₹0.25/pt) — this is a lounge-and-voucher card, not a rewards engine
- No forex markup published on the card's own page; the bank-wide standard is 3.5% (this is not the nil-forex LUXURA)
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 →
What earns, what doesn't
2 sourced rules · 1 pay zero
PNB publishes NO merchant-category exclusion list for any card on its shelf — not on the product pages, not in the Key Fact Statement, not in the MITC, which mentions merchant categories only to reserve the bank's right to BLOCK a card transacting on restricted MCCs. So this row states the two deviations PNB does document and nothing else; every other category answers "not published" rather than a guess.
- EMI conversions / merchant EMI · excluded No points survive an EMI conversion — PNB's MITC states it bank-wide: "On availing the EMI facility, reward points if any that have been accrued on the original transaction shall be reversed." PNB charges 2% of the transaction (min ₹100 instant / ₹200 Easy Pay) to convert, and 12–18%/yr on the instalments
per Punjab National Bank T&C · rank every card by spend category →
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 Punjab National 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.
Nil joining and Nil annual fee for as long as the PNB salary account stays open — and it is a DIFFERENT scheme from the Platinum sibling's: types15 opens "A Special Credit Card For PNB Salary Account Holders under OPTIMA & IMPERIAL Schemes", where types14 says EXCEL. Same construction otherwise, on a ₹75,000 monthly income bar instead of ₹25,000, and with double the lounge: 8 domestic visits a year (two a quarter) plus 2 international, run through the NPCI RuPay programme at rupay.co.in/lounges. Credit limit ₹50,000–₹10,00,000. Earn is 2 Reward Points per ₹150 (0.33% at ₹0.25 a point). Fuel surcharge waiver 1% (min ₹12.50) on fills above ₹500 and below ₹4,000, capped ₹350 a billing cycle. The MITC values a point at 25 paise; pnbcard.in/rewards.html still says 50 paise. No age criterion published for this card.
per the official Punjab National 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 Punjab National 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 PNB Rewardz programme page — the per-variant earn table and the 300-point first-transaction bonus for the RuPay Select band
- official PNB SALARY RuPay Select product page — eligibility, quantified lounge quota, voucher stack, retail earn rate
- official PNB bank-wide Key Fact Statement — confirms PNB Salary RuPay Select's joining and annual fee are both Nil, and the standard 3.5% forex markup
- official PNB SALARY RuPay Platinum product page — cited for the explicit NPCI/RuPay lounge-programme footnote shared across both PNB salary cards