Chennai Metro SBI Card
CancelA metro pass welded to a credit card, for a metro that stopped issuing it.
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: 2,000 bonus Reward Points worth ₹500 for spending ₹2,000 within 60 days of getting the card
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 ₹9,000 a month
At ₹9,000 a month — ₹1,08,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹300 gross (earn ₹300) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,00,000 a year = ₹300 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
SBI Reward Points are four to the rupee against the rewards catalogue — ₹0.25 a point, floor and ceiling. They reach no airline, no hotel and no transfer partner. On this card they can also be applied to the card's own outstanding, which is the same ₹0.25 by another route.
The take
Chennai Metro Rail and SBI Card built this as a dual-use plastic: one card that opens the CMRL gate and swipes at a shop. The credit side was ordinary and honest — 10 Reward Points per ₹100 on dining, movies, departmental stores and groceries, which is 2.5% at SBI's four-points-to-the-rupee catalogue rate, capped at 5,000 Reward Points a month — and 1 point per ₹100 on everything else, which is 0.25%. ₹499 to take it, ₹499 a year after, and the renewal reversed outright if you put ₹1 lakh through it in the preceding year. That is a decent entry card by 2017 standards and an unremarkable one by today's. What ended it was the transit half: CMRL moved to its own smart card and then to NCMC-standard contactless, and SBI's product page went with it. The card survives on no current SBI surface — not the 67-record product catalogue, not the Key Fact Statement, not the MITC — which is the full set of places a card SBI still bills would appear. If you are still carrying one, it is a 0.25% card with a ₹1 lakh renewal bar and no metro left to open. Close 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
₹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
₹800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹9,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹15,000 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
- 10 Reward Points per ₹100 on dining, movies, departmental stores and groceries — 2.5% at SBI's own catalogue rate, capped at 5,000 points a month
- ₹499 renewal reversed outright on ₹1,00,000 of spend in the preceding year
- Dual-use: the same plastic worked as a Chennai Metro travel card and as a credit card
Watch out
- Withdrawn — the card appears in none of SBI's current surfaces: not the 67-record product catalogue, not the Key Fact Statement, not the MITC
- The transit half is dead: CMRL moved to its own smart card and then to NCMC contactless
- The 10X caps at 5,000 Reward Points a calendar month — roughly ₹50,000 of accelerated spend, then it reverts to 1 RP per ₹100
- 0.25% on everything outside the four promoted categories, into points that reach no airline and no hotel
- No lounge access of any kind — the product page names none, and the card is on neither Set A nor Set B of SBI's current lounge list
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup, stated on the product page's own fees tab
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 →
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 Chennai Metro SBI Card earns, 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.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot. SBI Card removed the product page, and the card is absent from the 67-record product catalogue that backs everything sbicard.com still sells, from the Key Fact Statement and from the MITC fee table. The application route the page advertised — SMS "CMSBI" to 5676791 — is long dead. If you want an SBI transit co-brand that is still documented, the Delhi Metro SBI Card at least still carries a live fee row.
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 SBI Card's own Chennai Metro product page, archived 29-Nov-2021 — last published edition: the 10X four-category list, the 5,000 Reward Points-a-month cap and the ₹1 lakh renewal reversal
- official The same product page, archived 02-Jul-2017 — earlier edition that printed the 10X list and the ₹1 lakh bar but named no monthly cap
- official SBI's own 67-card product catalogue — this card is not in it, which is what makes it withdrawn rather than merely unadvertised