CASHBACK SBI Card
Keep5% online at any merchant on the internet — until ₹2,000 a month, and then nothing.
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: Not published — SBI lists no welcome or activation benefit for this card on the product record or in the T&C e-kit
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 ₹999 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.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #215
Why #215 India's best-known cashback card, and the one the whole board expansion was written to admit. It pays 5% on online spend with no merchant list at all — the broadest 5% any Indian issuer prints — and then caps it at ₹2,000 a statement. It is carried here on the earn, not on any travel benefit: there is no lounge, no point, no partner.
The unit is a rupee, not a point: SBI's own T&C says the cashback "is directly credited to the SBI Card account within two working days of the statement generation", and its FAQ says "Your Card Cashback does not expire". So ₹1.00 is floor, value and ceiling alike. What bites instead is the ceiling on EARNING it — ₹2,000 a statement cycle on online spend, ₹2,000 on offline, and never more than ₹4,000 combined.
The take
This is the card most Indians mean when they say "cashback card", and the reason it deserves the title is one word in its own terms: unrestricted. Every other 5% in the market is a merchant list — Flipkart's 5%, Amazon Pay ICICI's 5%, Swiggy's 5% — and SBI's is simply "Online Spends 5%", identified from the network's own online indicator and nothing else. Book a flight on the airline's website, buy a phone anywhere, pay a merchant that nobody has ever heard of, and it pays five percent. Offline, at the physical terminal, it pays one. Then read the cap, because the cap is the product. SBI allows ₹2,000 of cashback a statement cycle on online spend, ₹2,000 on offline, and states flatly that "under no circumstances shall the aggregate cashback in a single statement cycle exceed ₹4,000". The online ceiling is reached at ₹40,000 of online spend a month; past it, every further online rupee earns exactly nothing until the statement turns over. That is a genuinely good deal for a ₹999 card and a genuinely bad one for anyone who thought the 5% was the whole story. The exclusion list is the other half of the fine print, and it is long: thirteen MCC families earn zero — fuel, wallets, rent, jewellery, education, utilities, insurance, railways, gaming, tolls, government payments, quasi-cash and every EMI or standing-instruction payment. So the bill stack, which is what most people assume a cashback card is for, is worth nothing here. For a traveller this card does one thing and does not pretend otherwise: an online flight or hotel booking pays 5% back in rupees, subject to the same ₹2,000. There is no lounge access — checked in the product record, the T&C e-kit and the MITC, not inferred — no points, no transfer partner, no award seat, and 3.5% forex. Hold it for the internet. Do not hold it to fly.
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
₹999/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹999/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 ₹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 — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹5,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹10,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹24,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹24,000 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
- 5% cashback on online spends with NO merchant restriction — the broadest 5% any Indian issuer prints
- 1% on offline point-of-sale spends, credited to the statement, never expiring
- ₹999 renewal fee reversed on ₹2,00,000 of spend in the preceding year
- Cashback lands automatically within two working days of the next statement — nothing to claim
- 1% fuel-surcharge waiver on ₹500–₹3,000 transactions, up to ₹100 a statement
Watch out
- The 5% caps at ₹2,000 of cashback a statement cycle, which is ₹40,000 of online spend — past that, online earns nothing until the cycle turns
- Offline has its own ₹2,000 cap, and the T&C says aggregate cashback 'shall not exceed ₹4,000' in a statement cycle under any circumstances
- Thirteen MCC families earn 0%: fuel, wallets, rent, jewellery, education, utilities, insurance, railways, gaming, tolls, government, quasi-cash and card fees
- Every EMI, Flexipay and standing-instruction payment earns nothing — and converting a spend to EMI later claws the cashback back
- No lounge access of any kind — absent from the product record, the T&C e-kit and the MITC
- It issues no points at all, so there is no airline or hotel programme to reach — cashback is the ceiling
- Forex 3.5% plus a 3.5% dynamic-currency-conversion fee; this card is in none of the MITC's reduced-markup exceptions
- No cashback below ₹100 a transaction, and each transaction's cashback is rounded down
- Flipping to this card from another SBI card expires your unredeemed reward points immediately — redeem before you switch
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes SBI Card 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 · 9 pay zero
SBI publishes this card's exclusions as a full four-digit MCC table — thirteen families, reproduced below — and identifies the accelerated rate by CHANNEL rather than by merchant: "Online Spends will be identified basis the online indicators sent by Card Networks (VISA, Rupay. Etc.) and acquirer. Any transaction not categorized as online would be termed as offline." So there is no merchant list to consult; 5% online, 1% offline, and the caps do the limiting — ₹2,000 of cashback a statement cycle on each leg and ₹4,000 combined.
- Fuel · excluded Zero cashback on MCC 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983. The 1% fuel surcharge is still waived on ₹500–₹3,000 transactions, up to ₹100 a statement
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero cashback on MCC 6540 and 6541
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero cashback on MCC 6513 and 7349
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · excluded Zero cashback on MCC 4900, 4814, 4816, 4899 and 9399. A separate 1% Utility Payment Fee also applies once utility spends pass ₹50,000 in a billing cycle
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 ₹999 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 CASHBACK SBI Card earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — 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
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?
income, age and the route in
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.
Wide open. SBI's own product record flags the card `isOnline: yes` and tags it "best-selling", the apply funnel runs at sbicard.com/sprint/c/cashback, and the stated income band on the record is the lowest SBI publishes (₹1k–49k monthly). The card launched on 1 September 2025. Two things are worth knowing before you switch to it from another SBI card rather than applying fresh: SBI's own FAQ says that on a flip "all the reward points accrued and not redeemed on such variant would expire immediately", so redeem first; and the fee is charged as SBI's MITC defines it, with the ₹999 "Annual Fee" a one-time charge at issuance and the ₹999 "Renewal Fee" the yearly one, reversed whenever the preceding year's spend clears ₹2,00,000.
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
7 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
READ THE COLUMN SEMANTICS FIRST: SBI's MITC §1A states them outright — "Annual fee is a one-time charge … and renewal fee is charged every year" — so its "Annual Fee" column is a JOINING charge and its "Renewal Fee" column is the recurring one, inverted against our field names. The row reads "CASHBACK SBI Card | 999 | 999 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.2 Lakh or more in the preceding year)", so both are ₹999 and the card carries no separate joiningFee. EARN: 5% on online spends with NO merchant restriction — SBI identifies online purely from the network's online indicator — and 1% offline. THE CAPS ARE THE PRODUCT: ₹2,000 of cashback a statement cycle on online, ₹2,000 on offline, and §11.1(j) "capped at ₹4,000. Post reaching the capping limit, cardholder will not earn any cashback for that statement cycle". This SUPERSEDES the widely repeated ₹5,000/month figure. Thirteen MCC families earn zero (fuel, wallets, rent, jewellery, education, utilities, insurance, gift shops, railways, quasi-cash, gaming, tolls, government), as do all EMI, Flexipay and standing-instruction payments. No cashback below ₹100 a transaction; rounded down per transaction. NO LOUNGE ACCESS — zero occurrences of "lounge" in the 1,734-line T&C e-kit, and no lounge node in the product record. Separate 1% Utility Payment Fee once utility spends pass ₹50,000 in a cycle. Fuel surcharge waiver 1% on ₹500–₹3,000, max ₹100 a statement. Launched 1 Sep 2025.
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 — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — 5% online and 1% offline, the ₹999 fee both years, and the ₹2 lakh renewal reversal
- official Cashback T&C e-kit — the 5%/1% table, the ₹2,000 + ₹2,000 + ₹4,000 statement-cycle caps, and the full MCC exclusion list
- official SBI Card MITC — the ₹999/₹999 fee row with the ₹2 lakh waiver, and the 3.5% foreign-currency markup