BPCL SBI Card OCTANE
Keep6.25% back on BPCL fuel and four lounge visits a year — a fuel card that happens to open an airport door.
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: ₹2,000 of its ₹3,200 gross is a voucher or a hotel night, not points — worth that only if you would have bought it anyway.
Welcome: 6,000 bonus Reward Points worth ₹1,500 on payment of the ₹1,499 annual fee, credited within 30 days — the fee back and a rupee over
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 →
Breaks even only by erasing its fee at ₹17,000 a month
At ₹17,000 a month — ₹2,04,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹500 gross (earn ₹500) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹1,499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹2,00,000 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants
Our #2 for Fuel — 1 of the 23 questions this desk ranks.
SBI Reward Points are 4 to the rupee — ₹0.25 a point, floor and ceiling, reaching no airline and no hotel. What this card does better than its siblings is spend them without ceremony: 4 points buy ₹1 of free fuel instantly at 3,719 authorised BPCL outlets, with no minimum balance required, or you can take a BPCL fuel voucher. That is the honest use. The Shop n Smile catalogue is also open, and its ₹99 redemption fee on physical items and statement credit is the reason the pump is the better door.
The take
Let us be clear about why this is on a travel board at all: four complimentary domestic lounge visits a year, one a quarter. Everything else about the BPCL SBI Card OCTANE is petrol, and petrol is not travel. Judged as what it is, though, it is very good. Twenty-five Reward Points per ₹100 at BPCL pumps is 6.25% at four points to the rupee, and SBI's advertised 7.25% adds the 1% surcharge waiver on top — the best fuel rate any Indian bank publishes. Ten points per ₹100 on groceries, departmental stores, dining and movies is a real 2.5% across a big slice of an ordinary month. The ₹1,499 waives at ₹2 lakh of spend, the welcome hands back 6,000 points worth ₹1,500 in the first thirty days, and ₹3 lakh of spend adds ₹2,000 of vouchers with Yatra among the three choices. Now the caps, because they are what decide it. The 6.25% stops at 2,500 Reward Points a statement cycle — ₹10,000 of fuel a month, which a heavy commuter clears by the third week. Bharat Gas is capped at 500 points a cycle. The 10X is capped at 7,500 points a month and refuses to work at Metro Cash & Carry or Walmart. Fill up at any pump that is not BPCL and you earn nothing; fill up at BPCL using UPI on the RuPay variant and you earn nothing and lose the surcharge waiver too. Away from all of that it is a 0.25% card in a currency that reaches no airline. And the lounge is SBI's Set A list from 10 January 2026 — sixteen rooms in eight cities. Buy it for the car. Take the lounge visits as a bonus, which is exactly what they are.
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 ₹2,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹16,667 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹17,000 a month — ₹2,04,000 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
₹2,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹3,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹5,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹10,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹16,400 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
- 25 Reward Points per ₹100 at BPCL pumps — 6.25% as points, 7.25% with the surcharge waiver, the best fuel rate in India
- 4 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year (max 1 a quarter)
- 10 points per ₹100 on groceries, departmental stores, dining and movies — 2.5%
- 6,000 welcome Reward Points worth ₹1,500 for paying a ₹1,499 fee, credited in 30 days
- ₹2,000 of e-gift vouchers at ₹3 lakh of annual spend — Aditya Birla Fashion, Yatra or Bata/Hush Puppies
- ₹1,499 renewal waived on ₹2 lakh of annual spend, reversed within 30 days of the charge
- Points redeem instantly for free fuel at 3,719 BPCL outlets, no minimum balance
Watch out
- The 6.25% fuel rate caps at 2,500 Reward Points a statement cycle — ₹10,000 of BPCL fuel a month and no more
- Fuel bought via UPI on the RuPay variant earns ZERO points and loses the 1% surcharge waiver as well
- Any petrol pump that is not BPCL earns nothing at all
- Bharat Gas caps at 500 Reward Points a billing cycle — about ₹2,000 of cylinder bookings a month
- The 10X caps at 7,500 points a month and is explicitly switched off at Metro Cash & Carry and Walmart
- 0.25% on everything else, in a currency that reaches no airline and no hotel — ₹0.25 is the floor and the ceiling
- Lounge access is SBI's cut-down Set A list from 10 Jan 2026 — 16 lounges in 8 cities, not the full Visa network
- No international lounge access and no Priority Pass; 3.5% forex
- The fuel-surcharge waiver is BPCL-only, POS-swipe-only, on transactions up to ₹4,000, and caps at ₹100 a statement cycle
- Rent (MCC 6513) has earned nothing since 15 Apr 2024
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes SBI 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
13 sourced rules · 3 pay zero
Base 1 Reward Point per ₹100 at 4 points to the rupee = 0.25%. The rows below come from §11.4(a), which names each accelerated MCC, and §11.4(b), which is an EXHAUSTIVE exclusion list — "all spending charged to the Card under the Program will be eligible to earn Reward Points except the following" — so any category absent from it earns the base rate. Fees quoted in the utilities and rent rows are SBI portfolio-wide MITC charges, not card-specific ones.
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points — MCC 6513, discontinued on this card w.e.f. 15 Apr 2024, and SBI's MITC charges ₹199 + taxes as a processing fee on every rent transaction on top
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero points — e-wallet loading and recharge under MCC 6540 and 6541, w.e.f. 1 Jul 2020
- Fuel · capped BPCL fuel earns 25 Reward Points per ₹100 (6.25% at ₹0.25 a point) but stops at 2,500 Reward Points a statement cycle — ₹10,000 of fuel a month. Every petrol pump or service station that is not BPCL earns zero, and BPCL fuel bought via UPI on the RuPay variant earns zero AND loses the waiver; the waiver itself is a 1% fuel-surcharge waiver at BPCL pumps on POS swipes up to ₹4,000, max ₹100 a statement cycle
- Groceries & supermarkets · capped 10 Reward Points per ₹100 (2.5%) on groceries MCC 5411 and departmental stores MCC 5311, but the 10X pool is shared with dining and movies and caps at 7,500 Reward Points a month across all four; the accelerated rate is switched off entirely at Metro Cash & Carry and Walmart, which then earn the 1 point per ₹100 base
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹2,00,000 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 BPCL SBI Card OCTANE earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and 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
16 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: Set A list w.e.f. 10 Jan 2026 (16 lounges, 8 cities — Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune); no spend gate, and an unused quarterly visit does not roll over
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.
Openly available. SBI's live catalogue carries the OCTANE (productType BPCO) with isOnline "yes" and a working Apply Now flow, and tags it "trending". It is the upper of SBI's two BPCL cards — the ₹499 BPCL SBI Card below it earns less and carries no lounge quota at all, which is why only this tier clears decision 0012's gate 1.
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
6 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
MITC row verbatim: "BPCL SBI Card Octane / 1499 / 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.2 Lakh or more in the preceding year)" — joining and renewal are the same ₹1,499, so there is no separate commencement charge. The plain "BPCL SBI Card / 499 / 499" row sits immediately above it. Add-on cards free. Reward Points expire 24 months after accrual. Cheque payment fee ₹200; cash payment at an SBI branch ₹250. The fuel-surcharge waiver is BPCL-only, POS-swipe-only, on transactions up to ₹4,000, capped at ₹100 a statement cycle.
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 The card's own Terms & Conditions — 25 points per ₹100 at BPCL capped at 2,500 a statement cycle, the 10X MCC list and its 7,500-point monthly cap, and the exclusion list
- official SBI's own product record — ₹1,499 waived at ₹2 lakh, 6,000 welcome points worth ₹1,500, 4 domestic lounge visits a year, and isOnline "yes"
- official Airport Lounge Access — BPCL SBI Card OCTANE is in Set A, the cut-down 16-lounge domestic list effective 10 January 2026
- official SBI's MITC — BPCL SBI Card Octane ₹1,499 annual and renewal, waived on ₹2 lakh of spend in the preceding year, and a 3.5% foreign-currency transaction fee