Apollo SBI Card SELECT
DowngradeNine per cent back on medicine, and a points balance that can never leave the hospital.
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: ₹1,500 Apollo 24|7 e-gift voucher on joining-fee payment, plus a 1-year FITPASS PRO 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 ₹27,000 a month
At ₹27,000 a month — ₹3,24,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,400 gross (earn ₹1,400) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹1,499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹3,00,000 a year = ₹1,400 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 #209
Why #209 Four lounge visits and a 2x on travel MCCs get it through the door; the points cannot leave a hospital chain, which is why it sits at the bottom of the board rather than beside the cards it earns like.
The take
This is the cleanest test on the board of whether a lounge can carry a card whose points cannot. Four complimentary domestic visits a year at ₹1,499, waived at ₹3 lakh, plus 2 Reward Points per ₹100 on a published travel MCC list that includes airlines, hotels, rail and travel agents — both real, both sourced. And then SBI's own booklet closes the door: "Closed loop redemption, rewards can only be redeemed as Apollo Health Credits", no cash, no statement credit, no transfer, 24 months to use them. So the headline is 10 points per ₹100 at Apollo 24|7 and Apollo Pharmacy — genuinely enormous, roughly 9% back — spendable on exactly one thing. Base earn is a punishing 1 point per ₹200. Buy it if your household's chemist bill is an Apollo bill and the lounge quota is gravy. As a travel card it is a rounding error with an airport pass stapled to it.
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
₹1,499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹1,499/yr
The waiver ₹3,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹25,000 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹27,000 a month — ₹3,24,000 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
−₹200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹2,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹13,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹23,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹33,400 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
- 4 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year (max 1 a quarter) on SBI's 16-room "Set A" list
- 10 Reward Points per ₹100 at Apollo 24|7 and Apollo Pharmacy — about 9% back in Health Credits
- 2 Reward Points per ₹100 on a published TRAVEL MCC list — 4511 airlines, 7011 hotels, 4112 rail, 4722 travel agents
- ₹1,499 renewal reversed at ₹3 lakh of annual spend; ₹1,500 Apollo welcome voucher and a year of FITPASS PRO
- Free comprehensive health check-up for ₹50,000 of spend inside 90 days of joining, repeatable every card anniversary
Watch out
- Points redeem as Apollo Health Credits ONLY — SBI's booklet says they "cannot be exchanged for cash or credit", and there is no airline, hotel or statement-credit exit
- Base earn is 1 Reward Point per ₹200, half the denominator every other SBI card uses — 0.45% on ordinary spend
- Paying Apollo by UPI collapses the 10x to 1 point per ₹200 — the accelerator is card-swipe only
- Each accelerated category caps at 5,000 Reward Points a month, after which it drops to 1 point per ₹200
- ZERO complimentary Priority Pass visits — the booklet's table prints a dash in all three columns and US$27 + taxes a visit; the membership is free, the entry is not
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup, and the 2x travel rate does not apply to the markup
- Points expire 24 months after accrual
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
11 sourced rules · 5 pay zero
§11.6(a) is an exhaustive exclusion list ("all spending charged to the SBI Card under the Program will be eligible to earn Reward Points except the following"), and clauses (b) through (d) add three more categories behind it — rent, government and digital gaming — each pinned to its MCCs. A category named in none of the four earns the base rate.
- Fuel · excluded Zero Health Credits — MCC 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero Health Credits — e-wallet loading under MCC 6540 and 6541
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero Health Credits — §11.6(b), MCC 6513, and SBI's MITC charges ₹199 + taxes per rent transaction on top
- Government / tax · excluded Zero Health Credits — §11.6(c), MCC 9399 and 9311
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹3,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹1,499 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 SELECT earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹3,00,000 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
16 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: Set A list w.e.f. 10 Jan 2026 (16 lounges, 8 cities)
Opens 16 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 8 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.
SBI Card publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
per the official SBI Card 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
5 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
MITC row verbatim: "Apollo SBI Card SELECT 1,499 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.3 Lakh or more in the preceding year)". Joining and renewal identical, so the welcome voucher's "on payment of Joining Fee" wording names no second charge. Add-on cards free. Fuel surcharge waiver 1% at all pumps, capped at ₹100 a statement cycle. No redemption fee is published for this card — its points leave as Apollo Health Credits through the SBI Card app, not as the gifts/statement credit the ₹99 fee applies to.
per the official SBI Card MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
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 — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Apollo SBI Card SELECT T&C booklet — "1 Reward Point = 1 Apollo Health Credit", closed-loop redemption, 4 domestic lounge visits a year and no complimentary Priority Pass visits
- official Product page — ₹1,499 annual and renewal, waived at ₹3 lakh; welcome ₹1,500 Apollo 24|7 voucher and a year of FITPASS PRO
- official MITC — "Apollo SBI Card SELECT 1,499 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.3 Lakh or more in the preceding year)"; 3.5% foreign-currency fee
- official Airport Lounge Access — Apollo SBI Card SELECT is on the "Set A" domestic list, 16 lounges in 8 cities, w.e.f. 10 Jan 2026