RBL Apex
Keep₹1,000 for a lounge visit a quarter and ₹3,000 of milestone cashback. RBL's only cheap 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
Read the ₹0.4L figure carefully: ₹3,000 of its ₹7,000 gross is a voucher or a hotel night, not points — worth that only if you would have bought it anyway.
Welcome: Welcome vouchers worth ₹1,797 — a 3-month Swiggy One (₹299) plus a ₹599 ixigo flight/hotel voucher among them — on one transaction within 30 days and payment of the annual fee
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied: it earns nothing on utilities and fuel here, so that spend is dropped, not paid at the headline, and stops pacing milestones and the waiver. 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 for itself at ₹10,000 a month
At ₹10,000 a month — ₹1,20,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,000 gross (earn ₹1,000) against its ₹1,000 fee = ₹0 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants
The take
Apex is the entry rung of RBL's cashback ladder and the only card the bank sells under ₹2,000 that opens a lounge door. For ₹1,000 — nil if you open an RBL savings account alongside it — you get one domestic lounge visit a calendar quarter, ₹1,797 of welcome vouchers including a ₹599 ixigo flight-and-hotel credit, and a milestone ladder worth ₹3,000 in cashback across ₹2 lakh and ₹4 lakh of annual spend. That ladder is the whole arithmetic: reach ₹4 lakh and the card returns three times its fee before you count a single lounge visit. The rest is deliberately small. Base cashback is 1% and stops at ₹500 a billing cycle, so ₹50,000 a month of spend is the ceiling and everything past it earns zero. The 2% on flights and hotels lives only inside RBL's own rewards portal. The lounge visit needs ₹35,000 of eligible spend in the previous quarter, and the excluded-MCC list is long enough that rent and utilities will not get you there. And the cashback expires three months after the month it accrues. Claim it monthly, hit ₹4 lakh, and it is a fine cheap card.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
Here is the fee, the spend that clears it, and everything that has moved under this card since you last decided.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹1,000/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹1,000/yr
Break-even ₹10,000 a month — ₹1,20,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹2,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹7,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹8,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹8,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹8,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
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
RBL 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.
What has changed under this card
- 7 Jan 2026 RBL bolts a 1% fee onto FASTag loads and tolls — the fifth 1% line on its charge sheet issuer-wide
- 1 Jul 2025 RBL gates domestic lounges behind ₹35k a quarter issuer-wide
- 15 Oct 2024 RBL strips points from education, government and wallet spends 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
- 1 domestic lounge visit every calendar quarter — the cheapest lounge door RBL sells
- ₹3,000 of milestone cashback across ₹2 lakh and ₹4 lakh of annual spend, against a ₹1,000 fee
- ₹1,797 of welcome vouchers, including a ₹599 ixigo flight/hotel credit and 3 months of Swiggy One
- 2% unlimited cashback on flights, hotels, shopping and vouchers through the RBL Rewards Portal
- Fee is nil for customers who open a new RBL savings account, per RBL's own charges table
- BookMyShow buy-one-get-one once a month, up to ₹100 off the second ticket — ₹1,200 a year if you use every one
Watch out
- The 1% base caps at ₹500 a billing cycle — ₹50,000 of monthly spend, and nothing after it
- Cashback expires 3 months from the month it accrues and must be claimed into an RBL savings account
- The 2% is RBL-portal-only; the same flight booked anywhere else earns 1%
- The lounge visit needs ₹35,000 of ELIGIBLE spend in the previous quarter, and the excluded MCCs do not count toward it
- 3.5% forex markup and no international lounge — this is a domestic card
- RBL charges 1% on FIVE transaction types its Schedule of Charges lists separately from the reward exclusions: rent (MCC 6513, on every transaction), fuel and auto above ₹10,000 a transaction (capped at ₹3,000), utility spends above ₹50,000 a month, education paid through third-party apps such as CRED, PhonePe or Paytm (school and college websites are exempt), and — with effect from 7 January 2026 — FASTag loading and tolls above ₹10,000 a transaction. These are FEES, listed nowhere near the reward exclusions: a category can both cost you 1% and earn you nothing
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes RBL Cashback 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
13 sourced rules · 8 pay zero
Apex pays CASHBACK, not points: 2% unlimited on flights, hotels, shopping and vouchers bought through the RBL rewards portal and 1% on other eligible purchases capped at ₹500 a billing cycle. The T&C's exclusion table is explicit that the same MCCs are stripped from three things at once — the cashback, the milestone ladder and the lounge spend gate — and Bills2Pay and every EMI transaction go with them. All cashback expires 3 months from the month of accrual.
- Fuel · excluded No points — "Fuel & Auto" (MCC 0032, 2541, 4001, 5542, 5541, 5172) sits on the T&C's own category/MCC exclusion table; the 1% fuel surcharge waiver is the only fuel benefit
- Rent & property management · excluded No points — "Real Estate/Rental" (MCC 6513) on the T&C's own category/MCC exclusion table. RBL also levies a 1% fee on every rental transaction, bank-wide
- Wallet loads · excluded No points — "Wallet/Service Providers" (MCC 6540) on the T&C's own category/MCC exclusion table
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · excluded No points — "Utilities" (MCC 4900) on the T&C's own category/MCC exclusion table. RBL also levies a 1% fee on utility spend past ₹50,000 a month, bank-wide
Does your spend count toward the milestones?
not published — and we say which
₹2,00,000 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. RBL Bank states what the RBL Apex earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the milestones — the ₹2,00,000 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
32 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: ₹35k of ELIGIBLE spend in the previous calendar quarter (the excluded MCCs do not count)
Opens 32 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 19 airports — see the full map →
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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
RBL Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
per the official RBL 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.
Fee ₹1,000 + GST both years, and RBLs Schedule of Charges prints a relationship carve-out beside it — "NIL for customers who open New Saving account with the Bank" — which is not a spend waiver and is therefore not modelled as one. Cashback: 2% unlimited on flights, hotels, shopping and vouchers through the RBL Bank Rewards Portal, 1% on other eligible purchases capped at ₹500 a billing cycle (a binding ceiling at ₹50,000 of monthly spend), ₹1,000 of milestone cashback at ₹2,00,000 and ₹2,000 more at ₹4,00,000. All cashback expires 3 months from the month of accrual and is redeemable only into an RBL Bank Savings Account. Lounge is 1 domestic visit a calendar quarter on ₹35,000 of eligible previous-quarter spend. Welcome vouchers are worth ₹1,797 per RBLs own welcome-benefits sheet. No redemption fee on cashback. RBL publishes no income or age criteria for this card.
per the official RBL Bank MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
What's changed for this card
4 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.
- 22 Aug 2026RBL relaunches the Shoppers Stop co-brand as a Gold / Platinum / Black trioAn older single Shoppers Stop co-brand line → Three tiers — Gold (₹1,000), Platinum (₹5,000), Black (₹10,000) annual — earning 10 RP/₹200 (Gold, Platinum) or 15 RP/₹200 (Black) across the Shoppers Stop Universe, with points worth ₹0.25 / ₹0.50 / ₹1.00 respectively
RBL rebuilt its Shoppers Stop co-brand into a three-card ladder. The fee rung buys a richer point, not just more of them: a Reward Point is worth ₹0.25 on Gold, ₹0.50 on Platinum and ₹1.00 on Black, so Black's 15 RP per ₹200 at ₹1 a point is a genuine 7.5% back on First Citizen days inside the Shoppers Stop Universe. Welcome vouchers scale the same way (₹500 quarterly on Gold, ₹2,000 plus Platinum membership and a makeover on Platinum, ₹1,500 quarterly on Black). No lounge access on any of the three — these are store cards and earn like it, with value only inside Shoppers Stop. All three are already on our board.
- 7 Jan 2026RBL bolts a 1% fee onto FASTag loads and tolls — the fifth 1% line on its charge sheet
- 1 Jul 2025RBL gates domestic lounges behind ₹35k a quarter
- 15 Oct 2024RBL strips points from education, government and wallet spends
Verified against RBL Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — ₹1,000 annual membership, 2% unlimited on RBL-portal flights and hotels, 1% elsewhere to ₹500 a month, the ₹2 lakh/₹4 lakh milestones, 1 lounge visit a quarter
- official Welcome-benefits sheet — "Welcome vouchers worth INR 1,797", itemised as a ₹299 3-month Swiggy One and a ₹599 ixigo flight/hotel voucher among others
- official Product T&C — the ₹35,000 previous-quarter lounge gate with its quarter calendar, the ₹500 monthly cashback cap, and the 3-month cashback expiry
- official Schedule of Charges — "Apex: INR 1,000 (NIL for customers who open New Saving account with the Bank)" in both fee columns
- official Bank-wide MITC — up to 3.5% forex markup (the 0% carve-out names only the Safari family and Lumière) and bureau-tiered finance charges