Apollo SBI Card
DowngradeThree points per ₹100 at the chemist, and a balance that can only ever buy medicine.
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: 500 Reward Points, which SBI prices at ₹500, on payment of the joining fee, plus a complimentary OneApollo Gold tier membership
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 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 →
Breaks even only by erasing its fee at ₹9,000 a month
At ₹9,000 a month — ₹1,08,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹500 gross (earn ₹500) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,00,000 a year = ₹500 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.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #613
Why #613 The base tier under Apollo SELECT, at a third of the fee and without the four lounge visits that put SELECT on this board at all. What is left is a closed-loop health currency and a 3X at the chemist, which is a real benefit and not a travel one.
These points leave as Apollo Health Credits and nothing else. SBI's own T&C prices them at "1 Reward Point equals to ₹1" for an instant redemption at an Apollo counter, with no minimum — generous by SBI's standards, and worth exactly one thing. This desk marks the currency a shade under par at ₹0.90 because a closed-loop credit is only worth its face to a household that was going to spend it there anyway.
The take
This is Apollo SELECT with the lounge taken out and the rates cut by two-thirds, at a third of the fee. Three Reward Points per ₹100 at OneApollo against SELECT's ten, two per ₹100 on dining and entertainment against SELECT's two, and the same punishing one point per ₹200 on everything else. The redemption side is the good part and the trap at once: SBI's booklet says a point is worth a full rupee at an Apollo counter with no minimum balance, which is the best headline rate any SBI currency carries — and it is redeemable at Apollo, in Apollo, for Apollo, with no cash exit, no statement credit and no transfer. Take it if your household's medicine bill is an Apollo bill and ₹499 is worth 2.7% back on it. The ₹1 lakh spend waiver is easy. As a travel card it is nothing: no lounge, no partner, 3.5% forex. If you want the lounge, the SELECT tier above it is the card, and this desk ranks that one too.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card reaches break-even by ERASING its fee, not by out-earning it: the waiver is the decision.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹499/yr
The waiver ₹1,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹8,333 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹9,000 a month — ₹1,08,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee, and it gets there by erasing the fee at the waiver rather than out-earning it.
At your spend
₹1,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹2,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹5,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹15,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹25,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
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
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 the numbers above are the whole 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
- 3 Reward Points per ₹100 at OneApollo services — about 2.7% back in Health Credits
- Complimentary OneApollo Gold tier membership on joining
- 500 Reward Points, which SBI prices at ₹500, on payment of the joining fee
- Up to 10% instant discount at select Apollo services, on top of the points
- ₹499 renewal waived on ₹1 lakh of spend in the previous year
- A point redeems at ₹1 at an Apollo counter with no minimum balance — SBI's most generous redemption floor
Watch out
- Points leave as Apollo Health Credits only — no cash, no statement credit, no airline or hotel transfer
- Base earn is 1 Reward Point per ₹200, half the denominator the accelerated categories use
- No lounge access at all — that is the SELECT tier's benefit, not this one's
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup
- The Apollo rate is a third of what Apollo SELECT pays on the same spend, for a third of the fee
- Fuel spends are outside the reward programme entirely
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Apollo Health Credits 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
The T&C e-kit's §11 Reward Point Program sets the grid. Base earn is 1 Reward Point per ₹200 — half the denominator the accelerated categories use — which is 0.45% at the ₹0.90 this desk marks Apollo Health Credits at. Unlike the Shaurya booklet, this document states NO monthly ceiling on the accelerated categories, checked rather than assumed.
- Fuel · excluded The base rate is worded "1 Reward point per `200 spent on others spends" against "other non-fuel retail purchases", so fuel is outside the programme; the 1% surcharge is waived up to ₹100 a month
- Dining & food delivery · accelerated 2 Reward Points per ₹100 on dining, movies and entertainment — four times the base denominator, about 1.8%
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹1,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹499 fee. A different question from the one above — earning points and counting toward a threshold are separate rules, and issuers write them separately.
Not published. SBI Card states what the Apollo SBI Card earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹1,00,000 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
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.
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
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 2026SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programmeSBI 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 2026PhonePe SBI SELECT BLACK stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
- 1 Jul 2026PhonePe SBI PURPLE stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
- 31 Mar 2026SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES
- 9 Mar 2026Paytm SBI Card stops earning on school and education spends
- 9 Mar 2026Paytm SBI Card SELECT stops earning on school and education spends
- 10 Jan 2026SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees
- 1 Dec 2025SBI 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.
Verified against SBI Card'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 Product page — "Annual Fee: Rs. 499 + taxes", "Renewal Fee (per annum): Rs. 499 + taxes from second year onwards", waived at ₹1 lakh, and the 3X / 2X / 1X Reward Point grid
- official Apollo SBI Card T&C e-kit, §11 Reward Point Program — the 3X/2X/1X grid, "1 Reward Point equals to ₹1", and no minimum balance for an instant Apollo redemption
- official SBI Card Key Fact Statement — Apollo is outside the 1.99% foreign-currency carve-out, so it carries the standard 3.5% markup