#966

SBI Advantage Plus Card

Cancel

A credit card that lent you the deposit that secured it — and billed the loan back over eleven months.

Not valued

no published earn rate to price

Verified · 3 documents

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 SBI Card publishes terms we can cite.

Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →

2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants

SBI Card · Visa · entry

Visa Mastercard
₹1,000 + GST
Joining fee + year one, then ₹500/yr1
None
Fee waiver

The take

This is the most inventive product on SBI's dead shelf, and it is worth understanding even though you cannot have one. You applied with a card form and an SBI fixed-deposit form together and signed a lien. Once you paid the first statement, SBI Card lent you ₹25,000 or ₹50,000 as an Encash advance, wired it straight to State Bank of India, and SBI opened a fixed deposit in your name with a lien in the card company's favour. You then repaid that advance over eleven monthly instalments — ₹2,500 or ₹5,000 a month — and your credit limit opened up in steps as each one cleared, finishing at up to 85% of the deposit. Meanwhile the deposit itself kept earning you SBI's own FD rate. Interest on the card ran at 1.99% a month against the 3.35% SBI charged everyone else, and the whole point was the credit bureau file it built for someone with none. What it did not do was reward you: neither surviving page states a reward rate, a currency or a redemption route, so we carry it unvalued rather than guess. And the fee was the sting — ₹500 joining and ₹500 annual, both billed in the very first statement, before the Encash was even booked.

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.

The downgrade

SBI Card 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

  • 3 Aug 2026 SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programme issuer-wide
  • 31 Mar 2026 SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES issuer-wide
  • 10 Jan 2026 SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees 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

  • Interest at 1.99% a month, against the 3.35% SBI charged on its ordinary cards of the era
  • The deposit securing the card kept earning you SBI's own fixed-deposit rate the whole time
  • Credit limit released in steps as each Encash instalment cleared, finishing at up to 85% of the deposit
  • Built a credit bureau file for an applicant who had none — that was the entire product

Watch out

  • ₹1,000 in the first statement, not ₹500 — SBI billed the annual fee AND the joining fee together, before the Encash facility was even booked
  • Withdrawn — absent from SBI's 67-record product catalogue and from both its Key Fact Statement and its MITC fee table
  • SBI published NO reward table for this card on either surviving page — we will not print a rate it never stated
  • Neither Flexipay nor balance transfer worked until five Encash instalments had been paid
  • The fixed deposit carried a lien in SBI Cards' favour, so the money was not yours to touch
  • No lounge access of any kind; neither page carries a lounge clause

What these points actually fly

SBI Card 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 →

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.

Route Closed to new applications
Income · salaried not published
Income · self-employed not published
Age band not published

Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.

You cannot. The card was branch-sold — "Submit the form to the designated branch" — and both its product pages are archive-only. SBI's live secured shelf is SBI Card Unnati, issued against a fixed deposit with no joining fee and a renewal only from the fifth year, and SBI Card PRIME NRI Secured at ₹1,500; both are on this board.

SBI Card 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

Full tracker →

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.

  • 3 Aug 2026
    Partner major SBI Card
    SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programme
    SBI Card Travel Credits transferred 1:1 into Etihad Guest, one of eighteen airline partners in §3 of the MILES rewards T&C. At the ₹1/partner-mile anchor that was a full-value exit, and it was the only route left after the two Etihad Guest SBI co-brands were retired. → No Etihad route at all. The MILES rewards T&C now lists seventeen airline partners and Etihad is not one of them — the word does not appear anywhere in the seven-page document. Every other SBI partner survives at the same ratio.

    SBI Card's own MILES rewards T&C, re-fetched on 22 August 2026 and carrying a 3 August 2026 ModDate inside the PDF, has one fewer airline in it than the edition this desk read on 2 August. The deletion is provable from the numbering rather than from absence alone: the table's first seven rows are unchanged (Air Canada 3, Air France-KLM 4, Air India 5, British Airways 6, Cathay 7), and every row from position eight onward has moved up exactly one — Thai from 14 to 13, Qantas from 17 to 16. Position eight was Etihad Airways / Etihad Guest / 1:1. All twenty-four other partners we carry, airline and hotel, are still there at the same ratios, so this is Etihad being dropped and not SBI narrowing transfers. The timing matters more than the ratio. SBI phased out the Etihad Guest SBI and Etihad Guest SBI Premier cards from December 2025 and reissued holders onto MILES products, and the transfer route was what made that migration survivable — a Premier holder who had spent six years earning Etihad miles could keep feeding the same account through Travel Credits. That is now closed, and India's remaining pipes into Etihad Guest run through BOBCARD's Etihad co-brands, not through SBI. If you hold SBI Travel Credits earmarked for an Abu Dhabi business seat, they are Aeroplan, Flying Blue, Avios or Maharaja points now. ON THE DATE: SBI publishes no notice and no cut-off. The date here is the day the desk read the change out of SBI's own document; the PDF's internal ModDate puts the edition at 3 August 2026, which is the earliest day we can prove, not an announcement.

  • 1 Jul 2026
    Devaluation moderate SBI Card
    PhonePe SBI SELECT BLACK stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
  • 1 Jul 2026
    Devaluation moderate SBI Card
    PhonePe SBI PURPLE stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
  • 31 Mar 2026
    Partner major SBI Card / Etihad Guest
    SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES
  • 9 Mar 2026
    Devaluation minor SBI Card
    Paytm SBI Card stops earning on school and education spends
  • 9 Mar 2026
    Devaluation minor SBI Card
    Paytm SBI Card SELECT stops earning on school and education spends
  • 10 Jan 2026
    Lounge moderate SBI Card
    SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees
  • 1 Dec 2025
    Launch major SBI Card
    SBI discontinues the OLA Money card and moves holders onto a house card

Every SBI Card change we've dated → 19 events since 1998, 13 of them nerfs — worst year 2025.